How Michou Taught Me to Chill the Hell Out
It is December, 2013, and I’m walking the streets of Paris trying to put myself together. Little did I know a quintessential Parisian moment was about to deliver quantum healing to my grief-stricken heart.
Sixteen months earlier, my 22-year-old daughter Teal had dropped dead from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest. For an entire year, I was utterly and completely gobsmacked. But now my grief had finally taken hold.
In an attempt to run away from it, I’d packed up my laptop and went to Paris to work through my pain. As it turns out, solace was waiting for me at a little café in Montmartre called Le Sancerre.
Cafes in Paris are sacred ground, unofficial churches of the soul that happen to serve decent wine. You don’t pull out your computer and set to work here. Instead, you hunker down with friends over tiny cups of espresso, and discuss your love life in hushed, anxious terms. In other words, you relax and enjoy the spectacle of life.
But me? I’m an American workaholic. Customs be damned, I think, as I enter the empty café, pull out my laptop and plunk it down on the table in front of me.
The waitress smiles indulgently as she brings me a café creme, and everything appears to be cool. Or at least it is until an elegantly coiffed older man dressed entirely in blue sweeps in.
Immediately, the few others in the place are on high alert. I can feel a crackle in the air. Clearly, he is somebody.
Literally everything about this man is blue—from his royal blue velvet suit to his cufflinks, his natty, bright blue eyeglasses and his suede shoes. Others have now gathered outside the window and they peer in, attentively.
But the man in blue is oblivious to the attention. Instead, he strides directly up to me and turning to the waitress, rattles off a tirade of French. His entourage, who’ve gathered politely behind him, titter at his words. Apparently, he is dressing her down for allowing my ordinateur in the café. Even with my imperfect French, I get it.
Then he slides into the banquette at the table just beside mine and orders a bottle of champagne. I watch then as glasses are filled, laughter is shared, and a non-stop stream of admirers come pouring in off the street to kiss his ring and thank him, for simply being him.
My laptop goes ignored for a while, and finally, with a trace of shame I quietly close it and put it away. Then I just sit there, breathing in the lemon light of the afternoon and surfing on the warmth radiating from the table next to mine. It strikes me how very alone I am in my grief, and how very stark my life has become.
Finally, I turn to this man in blue, and I apologize for disturbing him with my computer. “That was a mistake,” I admit. “Oh, cherie!” he murmurs, and he reaches over to put his arm around me. With a melting smile, he reassures me he was not at all disturbed. Then he rattles off more fast French, as he gestures to my laptop.
The gist of what he is saying is clear. What is the point, cherie?
I’m taken aback, for I have no answer. Seriously. What is the point? That’s when I realize that this life-loving, ever-celebrating ‘minister of the night’ knows far more than me about how to navigate this short life.
The point is not to plough through it armed with phone and laptop, determined not to stop and feel. The point actually is to stop, and to surround yourself with good friends and good champagne, and do something my late daughter was actually quite good at: celebrating the moment.
For this is where the true gold in life is. This was something my unbalanced, grief-addled brain was only just beginning to understand.
A little while later, I rise and thank him warmly, my man in blue, and we wish each other au revoir. Little did I know I’d just had a perfect life lesson from Paris’s cabaret impresario Michou. For he asked me the perfect question—one I’ve thought about many times since.
What, indeed, is the point of all that lonely, driven overwork? Of all that detachment and isolation? As it turns out, there is little point at all.
Michou’s recent death reminds me of this precious bit of gold and his legacy, creating enjoyment wherever he went.
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