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50 Outings If you don’t have it in your own backyard, go find it somewhere else. Outings are good to take as randomly as possible. Go find a table in a restaurant a town or two away, a corner table with a view of the whole place. Notice the flower the owner’s mother liked enough to paint on a canvas twice as big as the TV, so you can wander on one petal’s rim and slide from there into its white abyss It’s easier to do this close to home, but never fail to go as far from home as you can find the means to get. One Sunday on a clean bench in the Parc du Ranelagh in the prosperous Seizième Arrondissement across from the blind Monets in the Marmottan, I had a double-chocolate ice-cream stick from the vendor’s wagon near the carousel. I mention that the bench was clean because most of the benches there had droppings on them, which was no one’s fault. All I had to do was find a clean spot and a bit of shade close to the trash bin for the stick and wrapper, while I woke to the feast of blues and greens. The rest was autumn and the moms and prams and boys on bicycles with training wheels. A girl in a blue dress walked out of the sun straight up the one long path among the trees as far as someplace else she had to go. ...

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