With all the chaos and unrest at home, I often find my mind wandering off to distant places and to remembrances of times past in search of the peace of mind they offer. These thoughts often settle on favorite haunts in the rural Eastern Townships of Québec. How nice it is to be in New England one moment, and with a quick step across an arbitrarily drawn line on a map, one is suddenly transported to France. Well, not exactly, but it is the next best thing. Along with these pleasant thoughts and recollections, I am reminded of my trips to la belle France, and especially to Paris.

My first visit to the French capital came in June 1968, at a time when the city, perhaps even the entire world, was in turmoil. Martin Luther King had been murdered in Memphis that spring followed by widespread rioting in several American cities — my hometown of Chicago among them. My church youth group collected food and clothes to take to the riot torn areas on the city’s west and south sides. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination came only two weeks before I left for Europe and I wondered what kind of a country I would return to. American military actions in Southeast Asia had reached a crescendo that spring with the battle at Khe Sanh. Eastern Europe was in turmoil with Alexander Dubcek’s attempt to moderate his predecessor’s hardline Stalinist policies in Czechoslovakia which would lead to the Soviet invasion of that country in August. Nigerian genocide in secessionist Biafra went largely ignored by the rest of the world. Civilization as we knew it appeared, much as it does today, to be teetering on the brink.

The month before I arrived in Paris the city and the rest of France had suffered through a crippling general strike which brought about the near collapse of Charles de Gaulle’s 10-year Fifth Republic (he eventually dissolved parliament and briefly went into exile in Germany). Workers closed factories and students occupied their universities, threw up barricades, and fought the police using heavy-handed tactics to restore order. Much of the Left Bank – the Latin Quarter and the areas around the Sorbonne – were sealed off by the police. This did not seem like the most auspicious time to travel to Europe, and to France and to Paris.

Upon my arrival the country was gearing up for new national elections which would, ironically, give de Gaulle an even stronger mandate than before. Much of the Left Bank, including the areas around the Sorbonne, had returned to some semblance of order as students abandoned their barricades and returned to the their studies. And yet, the tension was still palpable.

I had no real agenda upon my arrival. I simply wanted to be a flaneur, what Charles Baudelaire described as an individual who walks through a city in order to truly experience all it has to offer. And that is what I did. I wandered the boulevards and the backstreets just to see what there was to see. And what I saw was the aftermath of the recent unrest. Many of the ancient cobblestone streets had been torn up, the cobbles thrown at the police by the rioting workers and student protesters. There were still a few burned out automobiles about, and the remnants of barricades had been pushed aside near the Sorbonne. Sights similar to those I saw in Chicago’s ghetto neighborhoods that spring. I was seventeen years old and things I knew as a child had changed dramatically. I realized it was time to put away childish things.

When I returned to the United States after that first trip abroad, I better understood how changes were coming to my own country. The streets of Chicago were soon wracked by demonstrations and police violence. Mayor Daley ordered the Chicago police to violently put down large protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention. There I had my first and only exposure to tear gas. This once innocent young boy from America’s heartland what’s waking up to what America was becoming. The Chicago riots that spring, and what I had seen in Paris in the summer of 1968 taught me to understand what it meant to become an adult in America.

The following spring of 1969 I turned 18 and I registered for the draft. Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President and the conflict in Southeast Asia was heating up as was popular opposition to the war with large-scale demonstrations taking place across the country. We learned of the My Lai Massacre in 1968. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched their Tet Offensive at a the peak of US military deployment despite the so-called “Vietnamization” of the war effort. The US also began it bombing campaign in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Ho Chi Minh died in Hanoi that fall and the parties to the Paris Peace Talks finally came to an agreement on the shape of the conference tables and the placement of the representatives who were negotiating an end to the war and their respective flags.

I went off to college that fall and enrolled in Army ROTC which was required of all male students. Still I marched on the campus ROTC building during the nationwide Moratorium Day on October 15 during which nearly a quarter million protestors marched on Washington. This came in the wake of the the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society launching a their “Days of Rage” protests in Chicago. to “bring the war home to America.” Once again the protestors fought a strong contingent of Chicago police. A subsequent moratorium march a month later brought twice the number of protestors to the Capital while others marched across the country. Some of the fellows I had gone to high school with had already enlisted or were drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. One was killed the day he arrived in country.

I spent two relatively uneventful years in college. The 1951 draft lottery was conducted in July 1970 between my freshman and sophomore year. It seemed the luck of the draw would determine whether my future would include military service in Vietnam. My number was 246 out of 365 and I breathed a bit easier. I continued in ROTC during my sophomore year and was lucky not to be drafted (the highest number called to report for a physical was 215).

During the summer of 1971, I spent a quiet few months at home preparing for the upcoming academic year in Germany where university students, much like their American counterparts, were questioning their own government. Arriving back in Europe that fall, I would also return to Paris, my first trip back in three years, where I planned to spend several days of “decompression” in preparation for the cultural and linguistic “bends” I expected upon my arrival at my German university. I was excited to be going back to Paris and I remembered those heady days of June 1968 during my first visit to the city. Yet I was looking forward to a more tranquil visit. How had the city changed since my last visit?

Upon my arrival in late August, I had occasion to visit the old American Center for Artists and Students, a rather shabby and dilapidated building at 261, Boulevard Raispal, in the Montparnasse neighborhood. Founded in 1931, it had become a destination and hang-out for many notable Americans living in or visiting Paris. By the 1960s, it was one of the few places where one could see American experimental theater, attend readings by American writers and poets, and enjoy the best of American culture. It was also a gathering place for American students, those who were attending French universities, as well as those like myself, who were just passing through and were happy to find a place to read an American newspaper while enjoying a real American hamburger. I had been there in 1968, when it was still dealing with the after shocks of the unrest that fateful summer.

Not so in 1971. There were many young Americans in Paris on their own individual pilgrimages of discovery. It was here that I fell in with a group who were off on a Métro ride to the Père Lachaise cemetery in search of the grave of Jim Morrison, the charismatic frontman of The Doors who had died in Paris in early July, just a month prior to my arrival. The grave was still unmarked and we had several conflicting reports as to where it might be located. We never found it, but it gave me another chance to be a flaneur as I wandered through the cemetery looking for the final resting places of others – Balzac, Chopin, Moliere, and two of my favorite painters – Eugene Delecroix and Armedeo Modigliani. I also visited the Pantheon, not far from my hotel in the rue Monge (Gaspard Monge, a French mathematician and draftsman designed the building), which is the final resting place of Voltaire, Zola, Hugo and others.

During another visit to the Center, I met a group of American students attending the Sorbonne and we spent a good part of one afternoon and early evening in various bistros and brasseries along the Boulevard-Saint-Germain. As the evening wore on, one of our group told us about a party later that evening at the home of James Jones, the American expatriate writer best known for his novel From Here to Eternity (1952) which I first read the year before, around the same time I read his The Merry Month of May (1970), in which he described the unrest in Paris in 1968. We eventually made our way across Pont de l’Archevêché and the Pont Saint-Louis, to the Île-St.-Louis, ending up outside a rather elegant 17th Century building facing the river on the Quai d’Orleans.

I was introduced to Mr. Jones, who graciously welcomed us to his home, and the rest of that evening remains a pleasant blur of images fueled by some wonderful French wine. There was a constant coming and going of people with knots of conversation and debate in every room and niche of that grand residence. Several of us eventually ended up walking quai-side below the Pont de la Tournelle before taking it back to the Left Bank as I made my way back to my hotel.

During my year in Germany. I made a number of return trips to Paris, either as an end destination or on my way to some other part of Europe. I eventually found Jim Morrsion’s grave which had already become a shrine of tokens left behind. More than anything I enjoyed long strolls along the streets and boulevards bordering the Seine, and watching the riverboats and barges navigate past Notre-Dame, the Louvre, the Jardin des Tuileries, and Quai d’Orsay.

There were the regular visits to Shakespeare and Company, a Left Bank literary institution since 1919 when Sylvia Beach first established as an English-language bookstore in the rue de l’Odéon. It remained open until the Germans occupied Paris in 1941. It hosted many of the great writer of the age — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and others. George Whitman reopened the namesake store in the rue de la Bûcherie, opposite Notre-Dame in 1951. It became a regular stop each time I was in the City of Lights. Also of general interest were the small green book stalls — the popular Bouquinistes of Paris — stocked with second-hand books in numerous languages, as well as postcards and other paper treasures,

I would not return to Paris until the late summer of 1981 . . . a brief stopover on my way to Vienna on business. I was stuck at a hotel near the airport and only had an opportunity to go into the city for one afternoon and evening. I returned to the Pere Lachaise cemetery to visit the Morrison grave festooned with trash, liquor bottles, and cigarette butts and with graffiti defacing many of the nearby headstones. That evening I ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant in the rue Monge that I first discovered a decade earlier. The place looked much as I remembered it. Eating Vietnamese cuisine in Paris in 1971 seemed just a tad revolutionary what with the posters of Bác Hô (“Uncle Hô” Chi Minh) and Viet Cong banners on the walls. The banners were gone now although a small framed picture of Hô remained. But the food was just as good as I remembered. Unfortunately, the old American Center was gone and I wondered where American students and expatriates congregated now?

My last (but hopefully not final) visit to Paris came in the autumn of 2015 when I was traveling in Germany on a lecture tour coupled with a return to many of my student haunts during my university days there. There was no time to be a flaneur; just enough time to check out some museums and bookstores and to walk many of the streets I first explored nearly a half century earlier. Much had changed, but in many ways just as much had stayed the same. E.E. Cummings was correct. “Paris is a divine section of eternity.”

Perhaps it is time to go back again. I always enjoy my escape north of the border into Quebec and Montreal. But what a treat it would be to be a true flâneur again (in Montréal this term is rather pejorative, referring to one who is loitering). I would love to return to the back streets of the Left Bank where I wandered here and there with no set agenda or schedule. There is still much to see and experience. But time does not stand still and I am a half century older than I was when I first came to Paris. Perhaps fate will be kind and I will once again have an opportunity to explore a place where I first came to reinvent myself . . . where I learned to put childish things aside and become a man. “Paris, je t’aime.”