Tempus fugit

I took the metro to Georges V this morning to attend services at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.  When I lived in Paris in 1969, this was the church closest to my neighborhood, and I met many friends there.  During subsequent visits to Paris, I often visited the American Church of Paris on the Quai d'Orsay, a much more ex-patriate community-oriented church.  The much larger Cathedral hosts a lot of visiting rectors and pastors from the US, and it is in the heart of "chic" Paris, just off the Champs Elysees.  As you can imagine, the choir is fantastic and the church hosts many classical concerts which are both world-class and very affordable.

Today, as I sat in a pew, I found my thoughts wandering back to 1969.  Only 22 years old, I was just out of college and desperate to get back to France.  I turned down a Peace Corps assignment in Micronesia in order to make my way back to Paris, skipping commencement at Illinois State in my haste to return.  I had accepted a temporary job working "au pair" for a French family in the posh Avenue Foch area of the 16e arrondissement in hopes of later finding an English teaching position in the city.  (But more about that later....)

During that time, I walked to the cathedral every Sunday and always sat a few pews behind former Senator, former UN Ambassador and former Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge who was leading the Paris peace talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War.   Sargent Shriver (founder of the Peace Corps and JFK's brother-in-law) was the US Ambassador to France at the time, and I saw him on a couple of occasions as well.  (I always wondered if that might have been a not-so-subtle sign from God that perhaps I made a questionable choice in declining the Peace Corps assignment!)  

The late Sixty's was an incredible time of social change both in France and the US, and I had a ringside seat to the famous "evenements de Mai 1968" [see pictures on link] while studying here in France.  Student demonstrations, tear gas, stone pavements ripped up, classroom boycotts, crippling strikes, etc.  It was an amazing time in modern history, and student activism clearly changed the course of world events.  

I couldn't help thinking about that 22 year-old sitting in that pew who would hear time and again "Never trust anyone over thirty!" during those troubled years.  I'm 65 now and my KIDS are over thirty!  

How could more than four decades fly by so quickly?    And even more important, how could so much change....and yet so much remain the same?