A Little Toy Paris

August Six Word Photo Story Challenge: “Toys”

The Eiffel Tower is child’s play.

Everywhere on the streets of Paris, vendors hawk souvenirs of the city. Little metal Eiffel Towers are their top sellers. Tourists play with them, stroke them, turn them over in their hands.

In this photo that I took in the evening light from atop the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower itself looks like a toy. The beautiful buildings of Paris are building blocks snapped together by a child, the trees pieces for a diorama glued there in place. For the clouds, the child has suspended cotton balls in their artificial sky.

I love to act silly when I’m in a city. In Paris I posed in front of the battle scenes carved in the Arc de Triomphe, pretending my historical hero Napoleon could talk to me down through the ages.

Oh, I will do great things like you, Napoleon! Only my deeds will be through the pen, not the sword.

While in Paris, my dad and I sat in the sun outside the Centre Pompidou, the museum with its pipes on the outside — a playful toy building if there ever was one — and watched a mime. I’d never seen a mime live before, and he reminded me that the body can itself be a toy, just like any human creation.