A Change in the Landscape,Magnitude As Yet Unknown

It is finally possible, in this nation so profoundly and for so long divided by race, for a Black man to become president.

"War, Peace, Justice, and the Elections"
A War Resisters League Statement

Election Night, 2008—A commentator on CNN this evening mentioned that it had been 43 years since the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A little later I spoke with someone who was on that march, who said that if you had asked her then whether the United States could elect a Black man to the presidency, she'd have said, "Not in my lifetime!"

The march, in the spring of 1965, was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign to make the franchise a reality for African-Americans in the South. Almost a century after the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which declared that the right to vote could not “be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” poll taxes and lynch mobs still stood between most Southern Black citizens and the vote. Thousands—Southerners and Northerners—had worked to change that; some, like Southerner James Chaney and Northerners Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo, had died to change it. Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Let me be clear: I expect almost nothing from Barack Obama that we wouldn't have gotten from Hillary Clinton--indeed, almost nothing we didn't get from Bill Clinton. Obama, like all the presidents before him including George W. Bush, represents the war machine--although it is possible he represents a somewhat more prudent element of that machine than did Bush; he represents capitalism, although it is almost certain that his domestic policies will be less devastating than Bush's; he uncritically supports Israel.

Yet for me, and, I suspect, for many of us who lived through and participated in the civil rights efforts of the '60s, the fact that this has happened in our lifetime after all is, in itself, deeply moving. My African-American nephew DeShawn (above), now seventeen months old, unlike his own mother, will never have known a world in which it could not have happened.

This past weekend, I was on a family road trip. My white brother was driving, I was sitting next to him in the front seat, and a bunch of Black teenagers were sitting in the back of the car carrying on like--well, like teenagers. My brother played Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back" cd, and I was singing along with "We Shall Not Be Moved," when a voice asked from the back, "Aunt Judith, you like that music?" It was clear she meant, "You like that tired old music?" I admitted to liking it, old as it is. I said, "Once, it moved a movement."

So this is all: What has happened is not revolutionary. It represents no change in the structures of power that allot so much to so few, and so little to so many. It will feed no hungry children; it will house no homeless. It won't change, by the smallest increment, the proportion of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, in this country and in the world, who are people of color.

But a generation ago, we had to march--some of us had to die—so that Black people might vote. Something has changed. We have something to build on—and our work cut out for us if we are to build on it.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2008

A Shameless Plug

(For a while there I was seeing more places than I could write about. Trying to catch up now.)

Do you know what happened in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in May of 1886? Or from what Arizona town 1,100 striking (or allegedly striking) copper-mine workers were “deported” in 1917? Or where the first prolonged sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter was? Or the address of the Maryland draft board that was “raided” by the “Catonsville Nine” in 1968?

Those radical history stories and 52 more from all over (all over the United States, anyway) have just been published in a collection of political landscapes, The Path of Most Resistance: A U.S. Radical History Tour, the War Resisters League 2009 Peace Calendar.

I edited it. And wrote a number of the stories. It was inspiring to work on, and it’s inspiring to read.

Don’t take my word for it. Historians Howard Zinn and Robin D. G. Kelley say so too.

I’m gonna lay down my stylus and palm pilot and study anti-war and more … Thank you War Resisters League for this remarkable calendar, our daily reminder that peace, real freedom, the preservation of humanity and the environment, justice, and more of the fruits of our labor were won by collective struggle alone. We are inheritors of a tradition of resistance, the source of light in dark times, and if we forget, each page of this calendar will remind us of our real daily agenda.
—Robin D. G. Kelley
Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

The 2009 Peace Calendar is wonderful, truly inspiring. These are unknown moments in history, and the best moments, because they show resistance to war, courage, and comradeship. It is not only a calendar, but a piece of literature.
—Howard Zinn
Author of A People's History of the United States

I didn’t create the calendar alone, of course. There were the radical historians whose work we built on—historians like Zinn, Kelley, and Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote the foreword for the calendar. There was the hard-working committee that included WRL staffer Liz Roberts and editors Wendy Schwartz and Ellen Davidson; they collaboratively conceptualized it, critiqued early drafts, proofread it, and helped find graphics for it. There were journalist Erin Thompson, writer/editor Ethan Young, and activists Mike McGuire and R. Stokes, who contributed calendar entries. And there were small labor museums and radical history sites all over the country, including the wonderful Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, whose staffs gave unstintingly of time and research to help us collect the exciting graphics that illustrate the entries.

Together, we compiled this specific record of exactly where dozens of acts of resistance—and a few acts that evoked resistance—happened. Collecting and writing down these accounts was a little like going to those places and seeing those things happen.

So is reading them—you’ll see.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Lost Wages: Coming to Las Vegas

The Las Vegas Strip—formally known as Las Vegas Boulevard South—is unbelievably hot under the midday sun: 105 degrees, declares one sign. It’s also unbelievably cheesy, even to this Miami- and Los Angeles-loving eye.

“It’s so ugly!” I blurt as the bus wends its way from McCarran International Airport to downtown Las Vegas via the Strip, giving me my first sight of the fabled thoroughfare. I’m shocked—shocked!—at its shoddiness.

Here’s Paris, for instance—the hotel—signified by a 50-foot plastic hot-air balloon and a half-size reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. The real Eiffel Tower, standing 1,063 feet tall on its lonely eminence between the Champs de Mars and the Seine, overwhelms the visitor with its grandeur; this one, at 540 feet about the same height as the towers of the hotel itself, and its neighbors, looks shriveled and pathetic. Once in Paris the city, I bought a ball-point pen as a souvenir for one of my children. A tiny tower floated in the barrel, and when you clicked the pen, it played a digital version of “The Marseillaise.”

This is tackier.

Many people, judging by my above-admitted affection for Miami Beach and Los Angeles, have concluded I have a bottomless toleration for tackiness. I’ve loved the bright lights of Times Square all my life, although I preferred the old mix of vice-and-neon Great White Way to today’s Disneyfied 42nd Street. (I’m not knocking Disney, either, in its place. Taken to Disney World last year for the first and so far only time, I thought it was swell and loved the animatronics.)

The Strip is tackier. It seems to exceed even my acceptance of the tasteless.

Yet within 24 hours, my eye acclimates. I stop judging Las Vegas and start being there. No longer an inaccurate and inexpressibly vulgar rendition of my home town’s skyline, New York, New York becomes just the New York-themed hotel on the Strip. My body is less accommodating, however, and the heat actually makes me a little sick on the second day. But then I learn how to cope with it: Lots of (uncaffienated) fluids, wear a hat, and make up your mind early whether you’re spending the day on the Strip or Downtown.

The first two rules are standard for hot climates worldwide, but the last is just for the carless in Vegas. My traveling companion and I, you see, don’t drive. We’re depending on Las Vegas’ mass transit, such as it is, and, born and bred New Yorkers that we are, we’re in Sin City for a day and a half before we truly get how inadequate that is. We finally understand after we walk a mile under the broiling sun to the nearest bus stop and then wait, under that same sun, for forty minutes for a bus.

So let’s see: It’s really hot. It’s really tacky. I forgot to say, we go to see Elton John, and he’s awful. I’m never coming back, right?

Wrong. I’ll be back. In the end, I liked it. I like parties, and Las Vegas is one, at least for the people who are betting with their heads, not over them.

There’s the rub, of course. Your real hosts in Las Vegas, the folks who are paying for the party, are the ones who are betting way over their heads. They’re the ones who sit for hours at the slot machines, winning two or three or a thousand dollars once every so often, and putting in two or three hundred or five thousand. They’re the ones who generate the profits that put everything but the kitchen sink on the Strip: Paris’ Eiffel Tower, New York New York’s Statue of Liberty, the grand Bellagio fountains and the Venetian’s Grand Canal—everything but the kitchen sink and decent public transportation.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Crossing Streets in Cairo

The sun was setting when we rolled into Cairo. Talaat Harb Street teemed with people, entire families on foot, scooting between and among tiny cars in every state of disrepair. Lights glimmered through the dusky air—or was that the Cairo smog, a unique mix of dust from the desert only a few miles away and the exhaust of a million tired automobiles?

Men in djellabas glanced into our cab and leaned down and murmured, “Welcome to Egypt.” I was in love before we got to our hotel.

Fellow-journalist Ellen Davidson and I had decided to see Egypt before joining the Middle East Children’s Alliance delegation to Palestine(see “Lifta, Which Was His Home”). The Hotel Luna in downtown Cairo, where we had reserved a double room with bath for 110 Egyptian pounds (US$19) per night including breakfast, offered a free airport pickup service.

Countering our usual impulse to begin our visit on public transportation were the late hour and our intimidation at the idea of finding our way, jet-lagged and exhausted, through a subway system labeled in Arabic. So we had accepted the Luna’s offer and had been met at the airport. Air France had fed us several times on the long flight from New York to Cairo, and we were more tired than hungry. We settled into our room and went to sleep and got up the next morning ready to see Cairo.

That was when we learned about crossing the streets. Talaat Harb, which was now our home, turned out to be a Cairo rarity: an avenue of pedestrian-jammed, slow-moving traffic. One block away on either side of it, we found ourselves in very different territory: street after street of cars and buses, honking incessantly and whooshing by nonstop—nonstop even in the face of traffic lights, which appeared to be issuing advice rather than orders, nonstop even in the face of the occasional traffic police officer, who generally took care to keep well out of their path. We saw people crossing the street between onrushing cars and buses, but the prospect of trying it ourselves was terrifying. For half an hour or so, we wandered up and down Talaat Harb and the two parallel streets.

It was about 95°F in the sun, and there wasn’t much shade. At least half the women and children on the street had ice cream cones. Some women were covered and veiled from head to toe; a few wore bareheaded and in short skirts; most were modestly dressed, with or without head scarves. They didn’t speak to us, but many men, in djellabas or western clothes, said as they passed by, “Welcome to Egypt.” That was one of the only two English phrases we heard. The other became clear through the din of car horns and street sounds: Taxi drivers, slowing down as they drove by, honking at us, and calling out, “Cheap taxi to pyramids and Egyptian Museum!”

I was still in love, but it began to look as if I wouldn’t get to see much of my new beloved. At last, however, bored with Talaat Harb, we marched to the square at its end, Midan Al-Tahrir. Then we stood there, hopelessly waiting for a break in the traffic—

Until one of the djellaba-clad men grabbed my arm in one hand, Ellen’s in the other, and, dodging the cars and buses, pulled us across the street and deposited us on the other side. As he walked away, he said “Welcome to Egypt.”

We had learned to cross the street in Cairo.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Photo by Ellen Davidson

Brussels’ “Little Boy Who Pees”

I was born in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Later, I walked on London Bridge and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower. Then I decided I wanted to see Brussels’ icon: the Manneken Pis, a two-foot-tall statue of a little boy, naked (most of the time), taking what the British call a wee. What kind of world capital, I wondered, embraces a peeing little boy as its symbol?

There’s no question that the “little boy who pees” is Brussels’ most beloved emblem (thanks to the Belgian Tourism Office for the translation). From time to time, the city dresses him in fancy costumes, which are then kept in the municipal museum. All over town, arrows point to him as chief among the important sights. The chocolate shop next door (this is Belgium—there’s always a chocolate shop next door) is even named after him.

The bronze statue by Jerôme Duquesnoy has been standing at the corner of the rue de l’Estuve/Stoofstraat (as the capital of a two-language country, Brussels and all its signs are bilingual in Dutch and French) since 1619, when it replaced an earlier stone version. Its origins are lost in myth, but one story is that it represents a little boy who saved Brussels by urinating on the lit fuse of an attacking army’s bomb.

After a few days in Brussels and much wandering around narrow cobbled lanes and grand squares, I got at least an inkling of an answer: Brussels is the capital of a culture that cherishes more than grandeur the small details of daily life. Its signature dishes are frites—what we call french fries—and waffles, its most famous poet the cabaret singer Jacques Brel, its public art more likely to celebrate comic book characters and mayors than kings and conquests.

In that respect, Belgium is rather like the other Low Countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; think, for example, of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or most of the work of Vermeer. Yet that answer only begs another question: How did the Low Countries get that way?

There’s no scientific answer to that question. We can’t know for a fact what makes one culture law-abiding and another anarchic, what makes one give every guest enough food to choke an army, and another, right next door, serve exquisite miniatures.

Yet history gives pointers and suggestions. The Low Countries did share Europe’s propensity for conquests—there were the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo (the latter having been one of the most appalling instances of European empire-building). But the Low Countries’ history varied in some fundamental respects from that of their more grandiose neighbors, Britain and France. Britain was unconquered for centuries; France was defeated more than once but emerged each time as a proud nation.

In both, as feudalism metamorphosed into mercantilism during the Renaissance, and then into capitalism, the ancient aristocracies vied desperately for power and prestige with the new merchant and business classes. During that same crucial era, however, the Low Countries weren’t independent nations but possessions of the Hapsburgs—the Holy Roman emperors and Kings of Spain. The Netherlands didn’t achieve independence until 1648, and Belgium not until 1839. And at independence, neither had a home-grown ruling nobility or landowning class.

So when, with independence they threw themselves into the business of business, there was no genuine royal or landed class to fight the merchants—and no one to say that business was one whit less respectable than land ownership. Respectable it was—to invent, hustle, trade and profit—and respectable it remained. Today in Brussels, the main square, the famous Grande Place, is not the site of a palace, but the site of the city’s carefully preserved City Hall and 17th-century guild (trade association) halls.

The Manneken Pis is only a few meters away.

A final note: In a much more recent development—in 1985, to be exact—Brussels unveiled Jeanneke Pis, a statue of a little girl squatting to urinate, in an alley just across the Grande Place from the beloved little boy. No signs point to her location.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Bomb Story #1: The Arab, the Bomb, and the Website

This is about a writer in cyberspace, and telling it involves another confession: I play trivia games online. I play every morning at a website called Boxerjam. It’s how I start my day.

Now you know.

Boxerjam provides players with a range of free trivia and word games and supports itself by selling ads. The ads pop up while Boxerjam members are playing our games, and, although we try not to look at them, we can’t help seeing them, at least peripherally. Many are of the “hit a moving target and win a cell phone” variety.

One morning, I was on a roll when the moving target caught my eye and spoiled my game. The ad was offering me a free phone if I “hit Osama.” I was supposed to aim through cross-hairs at a target: a bearded man in a caftan and kaffiyeh, carrying a bomb with a lit fuse.

The thing is, the trivia games aren’t part of my real life. They’re not about writing or activism, which take up most of my time; they’re how I gird up for writing and activism. The last thing I want is for the boundary between them and reality to blur.

It had just blurred. I finished the game I was playing, then clicked on Boxerjam’s “report a problem” button and informed them that I found the ad offensive. I had done my duty. The boundaries could be firm again.

The next morning, I went back to the Boxerjam website and to the old rules: Play the games. Don’t look at the ads.

But I didn’t get a response from Boxerjam, and the bomb-wielding Arab was still there. I couldn’t persuade myself that I had done enough. A couple of days later, I fired off another problem report to Boxerjam, more strongly worded. It said, “Problem Description: The problem is the racist, offensive ad you carry with the caricature of an Arab holding a bomb. You wouldn't run an ad with a similar caricature of a Jew or an African-American, yet you feel free to stereotype Arabs negatively and offensively. Please stop carrying the ad!”

Within an hour, to my surprise, I got a response from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager, who told me that Boxerjam, like most sites, uses “third-party banner advertising.” She added, “We are limited in what we can specify will be displayed. I have forwarded your message to our Advertising Department.”

I thought, if the ad department is really getting involved, maybe they should have a more precise explication of the problem. I sent her another note. “Thanks for responding,” I said. “Please forward this to your ad department: Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing an African-American behaving like Step'n Fetchit? Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing a bearded man in a yarmulke caressing his money? The Arab-with-a-bomb ad is at least as bad--that is, all other things being equal, it would be morally equivalent, but all other things aren't equal, and at this moment both Arab-Americans and Arabs in the Muslim world are enduring real damage because of the credence given to such stereotypes. Thank you.”

Later that day, I was at a meeting at the office of the War Resisters League, where I used to be on the staff and where I now volunteer. After the meeting, I checked my email.

There was another note from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager. In its entirety, it said, “Just to let you know that we have disabled that particular banner ad.”

A writer’s life doesn’t get much better than that.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

The Water Is Wide (My Political Landscape)

The joint is jumping at the Clearwater Great Hudson River Revival Festival. It’s the Summer Solstice, Clearwater weekend at the riverside park in Croton-on-Hudson, the small town one county and 30-odd miles north of Manhattan that’s been home to the festival on and off since 1978. The Bluerunners zydeco band is rocking the dance tent, the wood floor packed with dancers of all ages, toddlers to graybeards (though of few colors, being almost all white), and I’m sitting on the grass, watching the dancing and beyond it the wide and mighty Hudson, at once keeping time and traveling through it, because, in more than one sense, this is where I’m from.

My answers to the question, “Where do you come from?” depend on context. “Brooklyn,” I often say, because I was born there. Or, “the Lower East Side,” because my first home was in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing complex just south of the Manhattan Bridge. The first home I remember, though, was in Westchester County, on Radnor Avenue in Croton, about a mile from where I’m sitting at Clearwater, the festival.

Clearwater is a ship, a cause, a nonprofit corporation, and a “music and environmental festival.” The ship is the sloop Clearwater, conceived in 1966 as “a boat to save the Hudson” by veteran activist-folksinger Pete Seeger, who lived on the shores of the great but dying river. Then in his 40s, Seeger had been blacklisted during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s; unlike many, he had remained committed to activism and the socialist ideal. When he realized that his beloved Hudson was in danger of irreversible degradation, he began singing for the money to build a ship that would sail up and down the river, helping to clean it up and raising consciousness about the environment. He called the ship the Clearwater, and it succeeded. Today, the Hudson is clean enough to eat from, and each summer, Hudson Sloop Clearwater, Inc., and Westchester County co-host Clearwater, the festival.

It’s a festival of many kinds of music—folk, jazz, blues, and dance music—and also of storytelling, children’s activities, environmental education and food and crafts. If, as noted above, the thousands who come are mostly white, they’re also almost all left-of-center, many of them activists in a wide range of good causes, most prominently peace and the environment. They come as families; many came in their youth and come now with their own children.

Me, too. As I said, this is where I’m from, in more than one sense. I was brought to hear Pete Seeger sing in my own childhood. The first time my son Adam heard him was just before Adam’s second birthday, at a Hiroshima Day protest. Today Adam and his family, are here, visiting from Maryland. My eight- and three-year-old granddaughters, too, have heard Seeger’s songs for children—

And this evening they'll hear him in person for the first time. Now 89, Pete doesn’t perform often anymore. He’s not scheduled to sing today, only to be interviewed live at 6:30 in the Children’s Tent.

It’s getting late. The girls are tired, and we have to get back to the city. But there’s a big crowd at the Children’s Tent, and as we pass it, we hear a familiar voice, and then a lot of voices, raised in song.

Pete is leading the audience in “Amazing Grace.” We sing along, of course. I take a blurry picture for the girls to have when they’re older, and we head home.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Lifta, Which Was His Home

Last summer, activist-journalist Ellen Davidson and I traveled the length and breadth of Israel/Palestine on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We stayed at the Ibda’a Cultural Center guest house in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in Palestine; we talked with Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and grass-roots groups; we visited Palestinian homes, a Bedouin village in the Negev, and clinics in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley; we walked around the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Ramallah, along with the newer city of Haifa and a very new suburb of Nazareth. We saw what Israel calls “settlements” in the Occupied Territories, new towns built by Jewish colonists in violation of the Geneva Convention that bars building by occupiers in lands under occupation; we saw the 30-foot-high concrete wall Israel is building, often between Palestinians’ homes and their farms and olive trees. We heard accounts of what Israel calls the “war of independence" and Palestinians call “al nakba”—the catastrophe—and its aftermath. This was one such account.

On a rocky hillside near Jerusalem, the shells of old stone houses cling to the steep slope. Once, they made up a village called Lifta. Yacoub Odeh points to one house: “This was my home,” he says. “Where I was born.”

At the bottom of the hill is the spring that provided Lifta’s water, along with the ruins of the village mosque and the communal oven and olive presses—two of them, so rich in olive trees was Lifta. The trees are there still, but no one has harvested their olives since the Palestinian villagers were chased away in 1948, during what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call al Nakba—the Catastrophe. Yacoub was a child then. Now in his 60s, he’s the human rights and housing supervisor with the Land and Housing Research Center, an international human rights coalition. For these 12 days, he’ll be our guide to the West Bank.

Yacoub lives in Jerusalem now. Jerusalem residency is a special status for Palestinians—they carry neither Israeli nor Palestinian passports, but rather Jerusalemite IDs. This gives them a little more freedom of movement than Palestinians have in the Occupied Territories.

But Yacoub can’t go back to Lifta. No one can, because to build or rebuild so much as a doorway would require an Israeli building permit—and Palestinians don’t get those permits. Ever. Sometimes they build without them, and then the police or the Israeli Defense Forces come with Caterpillar bulldozers and demolish what’s been built and fine the Palestinians for the cost of the demolition. Yacoub knows this all too well; everywhere we go, he shows us the sites of demolished homes. No one can build or live in empty Lifta now. Its olives ripen and fall and lie on the stony ground.

Yet Lifta isn’t quite a ghost town. The ancient spring has some religious significance to the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, and they come there to picnic in the shade of Lifta’s olive trees and bathe in its waters. They’re here today, staring as Yacoub walks us around what used to be his village. It seems they’re not used to seeing Palestinians here.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Versions of this story appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of WIN,the magazine of the War Resisters League and in the online journal World War 4 Report.

The Parisian Job

This embarrasses me, but I’ve eaten many a Paris breakfast at the McDonald’s around the corner from my favorite Left Bank hotel (the Résidence les Gobelins, since you asked).

I try hard to do as the Romans do when in Rome, and likewise in any other city, but I have a problem with breakfast in France. I don’t mind breakfasting on caffeine and carbohydrates, but I can’t bring myself to pay twelve dollars for a cup of tea and a piece of bread, even if the morning-fresh French bread is like no other.

The high price is actually due to a quirk of Gallic hospitality: When you sit down at a table in a French café and order anything, no matter how small, you have the table until you choose to leave it. You can read the paper or a whole novel, you can write postcards—or a whole novel—you can stare out the window at Paris going by outside all day and indeed into the evening and until closing time, if you care to. That’s the rules. They haven’t changed since the young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway was too poor to buy wood to heat his studio and used to write entire short stories over a single glass of wine.

Thus, if you arrive at the café first thing in the morning, it has to charge you what amounts to rent for the day—and thus the eight-euro breakfast (less if you eat it standing at the bar), which comes to something over twelve dollars at current exchange rates. A cup of tea and an Egg McMuffin at the aforesaid McDonald’s, on the other hand, costs two euros.

But if I have a problem with the French café breakfast, much of France has a problem with McDonald’s, which represents to many the worst of globalization. Farmer-protester José Bové actually did prison time for taking a bulldozer to a Mickey D’s in the south of France in 1999. So I was never comfortable with the Left Bank Egg McMuffins, but I kept eating them, until the Great McMuffin Heist, otherwise known as the Parisian job.

My sister and I were in Paris with a couple of teenagers in tow. We keep early hours when traveling, but the teenagers partied late and slept in mornings. So my sister and I took to starting the day with a walk around the quarter, then stopping at the very McDonald’s, picking up breakfast, and bringing it back to the hotel.

It was working fine until the morning that, carrying the bag with the caffeine, I pushed open the swinging door of the hotel and was holding it open for my sister when she screamed, “Voleur!” She said afterward she hadn’t even known she knew the word. I knew it—it means “thief.”

The concierge, who knows me—I’ve stayed there several times—dove out the door to chase the voleur. My sister and I stood staring at each other, realizing slowly that her pocketbook was still hanging from her shoulder, but that in her hand was only the stub of the paper bag that had held the Eggs McMuffin.

After a couple of minutes, the concierge returned, crestfallen. He hadn’t caught the thief. We all laughed a lot when we told him what had been stolen.

We never knew whether our breakfast had been stolen by a hungry thief or an anti-McDonald’s prankster, but I haven’t had breakfast there since. I eat it like a Parisian now, grabbing a croissant and a cup of tea standing at the bar of the café across the street.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak