The quality of life

In mid-October, there can be days when the sun feels like early summer, and the evening stay warm. The tables outside the cafés are full until after eleven and the streets radiate the day's warmth.

Morris Quint, the poet, had been over to sort out his lastest volume of poetry, and he, Fabienne Defarge, Sarah and I had gone for a simple supper, then moved to a café further along Saint Germain than American tourists could usually be bothered to walk.

Morris had always had a thing about Fabienne, and had unashamedly written a number of poems about her. Though primarily a poet of New England in the tradition of Robert Frost and Robert Francis, whenever Quint was in France, he wrote about it.

It was an easy evening with good conversation, laughter, argument and lots of wine and coffee. Sarah and I were back at the rue de Bac shortly before midnight and fell onto the bed and were asleep within seconds.

At around three, I woke up and realized I was still dressed. As I changed, I went to the kitchen to get a tumbler of water and passing the telephone, was seized with the idea of calling Andrew. It wasn't late enough to wake him up, but it just might be inconvenient.

"Hello?" he said.

"Ah, Andrew! I've had a brilliant idea," I said.

"Tell me tomorrow. I'm on the way to bed," and he sounded about to put the receiver down.

"It could make you go down in history," I said.

"Let me get my notebook," he said and the line went quiet for a while.

"Okay, mon vieux, gived it to me," he said.

I could imagine him slouching in the arm chair next to the phone with receiver tucked on his shoulder and the notebook on his knee.

"It's about quality of life, Andrew. If you can improve the quality of life for people, they will remember it, and you will have made a real difference."

"Sounds expensive," he said.

"Okay, listen to this. Nine-five percent of America has warm springs, summers and falls. Alaska is the five percent that doesn't. Okay, I'm making the numbers up, that's why you have an assistant who can debate the issue with someone else's legislative assistant," I conceded. "But remember, you can still become president even if you lose Alaska."

"I get the picture. Go on."

"How many sidewalk cafés are there in America? How many places where people can eat and drink unhurried, unhassled?" I began.

"Careful," Andrew siad.

"Okay, don't talk about the drink. Stick with eating," I said. "How many? Not a lot. Why?"

"Well, trading on a public footpath is a legal issue; there are ordnances, by-laws, and all that," he said.

"Dump them."

"What?"

"Dump them," I repeated. "Letting a café owner rent a bit of sidewalk will bring in a lot more money than passing by-laws. It could open whole areas of wasted space in city centres."

"Go on," Andrew said tentatively.

"You need trees, too," I said. "After the Dutch elm disease trashed all our cities and towns, how many replanted them? Not many. That was forty-five years ago. There'd be great trees there now. They don't cost much, and they add value to property and quality to the life of the people who live near them."

"How do you figure that?"

"How many trees are there in poor neighborhoods, or cheap developments - even after twenty years?" I challenged.

"Not many, I guess."

"Turn it around. How many affluent neighborhoods are there without trees - I'm not talking Phoenix or Albuquerque, here, but civilized places."

"Can I afford to lose Arizona and New Mexico?" Andrew asked.

"Yeah, and Nevada; but think trees," I enthused. "School children could have tree=growing projects. They could grow acorns, chestnuts, horse chestnuts and maple trees. Hell, they could even grow sumacs - they actually sell them here in nurseries."

"Some perv would grow poison ivy," Andrew said. "And then, sue the school district."

"So what?" I said. "Are you going to let a handful of cretins condemn American cities to being botanical wastelands?"

Silence.

"Andrew, this is brilliant. It's cheap, effective, revenue-generating, profit-making and all the towns that go for it first will have tremendous amounts of free publicity and rising property values."

"It does sound good," he said eventually. "Is this why the quality of life is so good in France?"

"It certainly is," I said. "But two hour lunch breaks and five week annual vacations help."