Paris with Kids

Then, as we entered a familiar universe, there was a curation-be-damned explosion of kid sweat and excitement. The boys ran from the life-size Naboo starfighter to an assassin droid's speeder to a heavy-breathing Dark Vador (you can figure out who that is without the English translation) to a Yoda puppet who looked a bit tragic there, frozen static behind plexiglass.

My son asked to do something he rarely asks to do -- borrow my camera to take pictures. (A review of my digital camera later showed numerous angle shots of that starfighter and a podracer.) Eleven years old, in my experience, seems to be the age at which cameras wielded by adults normally elicit goofball faces and extended tongues. But a true sign of kid vacation excitement, I learned, is when they want to preserve memories to show their friends -- something that normally doesn't happen when the parents are window-shopping in Saint-Germain.

Film images exploded from huge flat screens everywhere, and I had the strange sense and creeping concern that it was here, in the center of George Lucas's universe, that my son felt truly at home.

About an hour later, his face flush and his hair damp, my son came up to me and announced, "Okay, let's go."

We walked through an exit corridor and arrived, predictably, in a big gift shop selling everything "Star Wars": $180 lightsaber replicas, Darth Vader bath and shower gel, T-shirts declaring in five languages "Que la force soit avec toi" ("May the force be with you").

That afternoon, I rented bikes with the boys while their moms went to a cafe. We rode up and down the canal, burning off pent-up "force" and dodging pedestrians, dogs and smaller children who wandered onto the bike path.

At one point at the end of the day, I asked the boys if they were ready to visit the Louvre.

"Oh no," they pleaded.

"There's the painting of Mona Lisa whose eyes follow you around, and that's the main attraction," my son said, world-weary.

"The Louvre," Mathieu scoffed, "is so a hundred years ago."

* * *

The next two days, my wife and son and I were on our own, as Mathieu and his mom left to visit friends in the country. Monday morning, we had planned to visit the Grevin wax museum on Paris's busy Boulevard Montmartre. At breakfast, I'd heard the first signs of mutiny: Our son announced he'd rather stay in bed at the hotel and watch cartoons.