The Earthly Magic of Wood

Cross Fertilization I

An olive tree outside the Orangerie at Jardin du Luxembourg bears little brown tags on which people have written their truths (Love is Pain!) and their wonders (I love that you survive on broccoli and water!) as well as wishes (Wish for love and happiness!).

Trees of Calistoga

There are three such trees in sweet, lazy Calistoga, California: one for wishes, one for secrets, and a third for--is it dreams? Like the dreams of nutty Sam Brannan who founded Calistoga, Mormon visionary, raving alcoholic, daring businessman who imported 10,000 French mountain sheep, whom the locals drove off cliffs, and thousands of silkworms, all of whom died. But Calistoga's dream life lives on, a stage set of Americana.

Trees can take our secrets and dreams. They take our carbon dioxide and they take our human frailties-- in a new book, Blinded by Science, Matthew Silverstone writes that trees can cure mental illness, ADHD, depression, alleviate headaches, and improve reaction time and concentration levels. Hugging a tree realigns your vibrational frequency in a self-healing pattern, like tai chi.

Similarly, the earth can take our pain. That was what we said, in the days when I used to run hundreds and hundreds of miles, 20 years ago---give it to the earth, give your pain to the earth. In the book Born to Run, Bruce McCullough keeps that tradition alive in the same mystical fashion. Our feet know how to run, give them up to the earth. Give up the Nikes, the "baskets" as they say here in France, just slap those bare feet on the ground and run. My old boss at the Population Council, as McCullough mentions, was one of those Japanese masters of stoicism who trained by mowing the lawn, simply staying on his feet for 10 hours at a time. The great Yiannis Kouros, who ran day and night without stopping till a doctor put him on his back because his temperature was too high, said that when his feet got tired, he ran with his arms, when his arms got tired, he ran with his heart, when his heart got tired he ran with his back. We mere mortals ran in segments. I did 20 miles in the morning, and 20 miles in the afternoon, and 20 miles in the magical night under a gleaming 700 ton steel globe that watched, in the half darkness, over our wandererings. Nowadays, remembering that old identity of mine, the long distance runner, has given me more strength than I had forgotten about.

Cross-Fertilization II

Our own bocio

A stunning exhibition at the Cartier Foundation on voodoo, or Vaudou, brings the tremulous, tragic, tempestuous faces of the bocio, rough little dolls lost in a world of pain, bound with coarse rope or pierced with old nails or trapped in ancient fishing nets. Stark figures of rough, bitter materials, the healing dolls of the slave culture of West Africa were meant to protect and cure relentless ills. A sign over the stairs reads:

Salut a lui qui vient de dénouer l'énigme des enlacements.  Chaque fois qu'on défait un noeud, on sort un Dieu.
Greetings to the one who has just unraveled the enigma of the intertwinings.  Every time a knot is undone, a god is released.
The collection had been gathered by a cowboy hippy explorer (Jacques Kerchache) who is praised by Malraux, but in video footage seems callous, bragging of his own achievement in wresting these objects away from the deepest wombs of villages. He sat with the long-suffering villagers and learned their magic but he does not betray any respect for them. The little figures, bound in twine, pierced with awls, many of them double-headed or double-bodied (as all-seeing protective spirits), have faces of suffering without social masks. Their miserable faces speak not of salvation but of a rough magic of blood and sacrifice. There is a certain code: a figure bound in ropes is fighting servitude and anger, one pierced is trying to penetrate a mystery (or carries a voodoo curse for the intended victim), the small shells decorating some totems signify desire. Alienated from their native purpose these lost voodoo gods stare, disoriented, at the Parisians wandering in their midst.

Our house spirits

I am not unfamiliar with such faces--at home we have plenty of masks that were meant for powerful magic, but that Jacques hangs on the walls perhaps to exorcise domestic demons.

Parc des Arts, Moscow

There is a similarity to a sculpture exhibit that took place in early spring at Jardin du Luxembourg of wooden logs decorated with faces, as plain and crude as the faces on snowmen. It is deeply elemental, the way wood becomes flesh, even when you look at an old likeness of St. Dominic, created in his own lifetime. But these bocio remind me most of tragic scupltures hidden away in the Parc des Arts in Moscow, the graveyard for memorials to the age of Stalin.

Parc des Arts

Parc des Arts

St. Dominic, 13th c.

La Maison Familiale - Léran

We Americans are strangers to the pleasures of the maison familiale, the shared rhythms of keeping house (and ours has not been renovated since 1948) among several generations of family. Clusters of extended family come and go. The presiding mother, whoever she may be, shops for the invading armies of cousins, while fathers swat flies from the barbecue, and waves of children set and clear the table (and nowadays the dishwasher) for long meals in the garden, barely shaded from the powerful heat of the Midi.

Chateau de Léran

Our maison familiale is the 18th c. house of Jacques' childhood, in a tiny village, 7 hours away, in the Ariège. Léran's crumbling homes are preserved mostly by Brits, as is the one eating establishment in town. The chateau, where Jacques once played with the Count's son among the sprawling gardens, dark and frightening under enormous unkempt trees of that wild paysage, now houses condominiums. Its romantic turrets and elaborate stonework are recent conceits, disguising its sturdy medieval origins. In a Venetian church we once stumbled on a portrait of Léran's 18th c. Count de Levis-Mirepoix, where he had been buried after fleeing to Venice during the French revolution.

Jacques in his old haunts

But the arresting beauty of Léran is in the pristine air, the herons taking off in long-legged flight over the rushing river, the thick underbrush of birdsong, the immense weeping willows, the sweeping vistas. In early morning the yellow crescent moon gleams through the old magnolia tree, and then with an eruption of birdsong disappears into pastel brightness, as the gold aura creeps subtly toward l'aube.

In the bird soaked dawn I climb down the worn stairs to my morning tai chi on rough ground, mole hills and magnolia cones and long tender grass. It is a world of hollyhocks and roses and tiger lilies, tall and wild, the garden a tangle of green and magenta. Broad leathery magnolia leaves carpet the lawn.

The garden

Jacques has never wanted to come here when the house was empty, but I find my days full and productive, blinded as I am by deep green and azure, by a plunge into a native land, a perfect complement to Paris. I want to receded and glide in the green, and learn about Jacque's boyhood steps--I have never had a home base like this, my life has been so peripatetic. He is happy to be here and calls every room by its family name (the salle du devant, the crumbling petit salon). Life is simple here, while the old house mulls over its own memories, bedraggled as the children like to keep it, unimproved. They don't want a piece of furniture moved.

Montségur

We walk to the lake in the heat of the afternoon where I paddle through cool opaque waters surrounded by the Pyrenees. Walking back, I am still in my swimming suit on a narrow heavily trafficked road. We pet three shy donkeys that await us in their fields, with their enormous, liquid eyes where flies gather. A little gleaming eye flashes at me from the black hot road, engulfed in black down. I had only realized it was a tiny chick and bent towards it when a car swiped violently past, leaving only a smear of blood. I begin to feel the onerous sun. The chimes of the angelus turn round and round their four note melody.

The doves coo, a plaintive flying bird swoops, four or five different birdsongs twitter, and a steady two-note chorus chirps, loudest at the sun's rising and setting.

Artwork at Lac du Montbel

At the lake two girls in bikinis were building clay statues of sunbathers as I swam out in warming currents in the clay-darkened aqua waters to drift among blue Pyrenees, while distant thunder sounded from purple clouds on the far side. Even under the overcast sky, the sun singed my face. Jacques came down from his shady perch with a little blond boy, Victor, at first shy, then later when no one would take him down again to see the clay people he started shouting "pee-pee! ca-ca!" "Je ne comprends rien, je suis Americaine," I responded.

12th c. frescoes of the Vals church

On a drizzly day of cooling air there is no use swimming, so I connect to the wifi at the bistro among playful comments from the old characters drinking there. A gorgeous great dane stares at me and I at her. A gray old man with chic eyeglasses thinks I am admiring him. On leaving, he bows: Madame, mes homages.

And now the storm has passed through, the skies are baby blue underneath slowly sailing puffs, and it will warm again. Light glows on the towering weeping willow.

Burned at the stake

We walk along the Chemin de Vigne, Jacques' mother's old walk above Léran where we can see the bowl of blue lands formed by the Pyrenees. We cut down through bent grasses along the river swept in tresses of weeping willow. There are fresh wood cabins in a kind of camping ground or trailer park that sprawls around the chateau like a feudal village. For all their modesty they are sweeter and greener than the stucco facades of the village, dry as sand in the punishing heat.

Much is unique nearby--the Romanesque church of Vals, built upon a subterranean crypt in the 11th century, with fanciful frescoes from the 12th c. There is the Grotte de Niaux, with its 15,000 year old drawings that rise toward you in the cathdral space as you penetrate into darkness. There are the countless chateaux of the Cathares, in states of varying ruin. The most dramatic, Montségur, is at the top of a steep woody climb reaching to 1214 meters. Montségur was besieged by thousands of Catholic Crusaders for 8 months, before they surmounted the escarpment and burned the unrepentant Cathares the 16th of March, 1244.

Chateau de Roquefixade

But this year we limited our excursions, beginning with Fanjeaux, home of St. Dominic. Its 13th c. streets are bordered by ancient split beam houses. It stands over the meeting of the Atlantic route (the Ariege river) and the Mediterranean (via the Aude), a crossroads of French cultures. St. Dominic's visions of fire miracles occurred here, foreshadowing the terror of the Inquisition and the extinction the local Cathare culture, and with that the eventual domination of this rough country by France.

Carcassonne

And we visited the medieval fortress of Carcassonne, built on a 1st century Roman camp, a Visigoth capital in the 5th century, taken over by Franks in the 8th, and besieged by Crusaders in 1209. Today it feels hectic with tourists, lacking in charm, a full medieval city but with such blatant signature retouching by Viollet le Duc that parts of it resemble a Harry Potter scene set. The fortress told few tales from its medieval towers, round and black-capped like those of the Conciergerie, as the wind blew cold that day. We were warmed by a powerful quartet of Russian men in the Romanesque (1006 AD) church of St. Nazaire, to which the Crusaders added a beautiful gothic choir. There is a charming 14th c. French gothic pieta at the edge of the Romanesque nave that is fashioned of the rough gray stone of the region. Outside, beyond the warmth of the deep Russian voices, an extremely disabled and beautiful young girl in a wheelchair moaned and wailed. Her family surrounded her, dismayed, under an exaggerated set piece of gargoyles that looked like a movie set. Near her a young mastiff sat with its own family, its pink and menacing head saddened by the little girl.

St. Nazaire

The next day I had news of a friend's sudden passing, which made me weep a little in the garden, till a songbird, golden like the fallen magnolia leaves, circled closer and closer to comfort me. Then a ravishing blue butterfly, like those that had two years previous followed me up the climb to the Chateau Roquefixade when I wore the same blue skirt, fluttered around me and landed for long minutes on my computer, allowing me to admire the intricate beads of color that border its wings, dipped in pale blue fuzz that thickens around the regal, delicate head with its glittering black eye and graceful blue antennae. Doves called soothingly behind layers of twitters. But for warbling you must go running over the fields.

Mornings I jog out under the trimmed plain trees along the fancified chateau, up along pastures of red cattle and turned land, along bales of hay drying, perfect quilts of fields in a bowl of land beneath the craggy Pyrenees. I am led by small, regal, black and white butterflies like Japanese monarchs, encircling me and relaying my coming to their industrious clan along the sides of the road. Crimson poppies dot the fields, their damask garb folding back and forth in the wind. Stone ruins of houses tumble into tall lavender and enormous thistles, and the occasional car zips past, for which I have to stand off the narrow little ribbon of asphalt. The women I pass yodel bon JOUR in an unrestrained ascending pitch, while the men say BON jour--all right, I see you.

Protestant cemetery

There are also the tiny allies of nature. A muscular spring drains through the lily pad pond to the little river. Frogs gather near me, as I meditate, some on the lily pads and some bravely jump out of the pond to bask dry in the sun. I've found a more level plot for tai chi, facing a wild abandoned garden, long left to flourish in its own way. Magic is here in the swaying willow and fern trees and tiger lilies hiding secrets in the grasses.

And now more Loups arrive--a family of 4, another cousin and friends. Only French spoken from now on. There is a sudden intimacy. The ados are suitably distant and judgmental, but they all pitch in together for lunch, taking on the barbecue. Some of us amble to the lake in a misty rain. The clay statues sprawl in the sand even after the night's downpour--a lanky man with a branch for a penis, and a round little Negress with flowers for hair. Layers of time rest in the undulating blue horizon.

The next day Jacques and I explored some unmarked roads, driving on the narrow hot winding asphalt through villages half or fully abandoned, the wooden barn doors in splinters, cabins patched together with concrete and plastic covering, magnificent white horned cattle and shorn sheep, of whom the largest drop onto the ground in the heat. We drove through the valleys of the deep green mountains, trying to locate the white escarpment of Montségur, always hidden behind other peaks. We drove through dappled forests under ropes of green, asking direction of tough southern men, one of whom wished us "soyez beni", but most offer unwavering gazes. The heat became unbearable in the little metallic prison of a car, and a growing headache became a searing migraine. So we raced to the aqua lake with its soft clay, where only the female idol remained intact, wide-eyed and brash. The male's branch of a penis had been removed, his clay body crumbled. I plunged into the lake, the layers of warm and cold, and paddled alone far from the shore. Then my body lay completely limp, on the beach, till Jacques came down and we entered the water at a glacial pace together.

Southern Léran has larger houses and lush jardins a l'anglais. Shorn sheep galloped from us as we walked to the pond for cleansing water, a passive filtration system that waits for sediment to drop to the bottom. The Protestant cemetery has lost the charm I remembered, its starkly simple graves marked only by rose bushes. Half of it is hideous, with plastic flowers and garish stones jumbled together, but in the other half, where Jacques' family lies, there is austere and sober memory. Then we circled back, past our lonely donkey friend with his beautiful eyes where flies swarm. We stopped in to see a cousin--one of many in the village. Georgie told us about his travels to Vietnam, the country where he had grown up and whose language he spoke, and where his mother had been a prisoner of the Vietminh for a year. George and Monique are in their 80's, and very present, observant, and voluble. Jacques grew talkative and jovial with his tall aperitif, uncharacteristically hilarious, but we had to get home, it was 8 pm.

Sant Joan de Caselles

The last day we drove to the Independent Municipality of Andorra, a feudal state till 1993, now a duty-free shopping center. We departed on roads that wound around Léran, through villages of a few houses or farms, through forests, past large white horned cattle communing together, wisely ignoring their future. Then we took the torturous sinuous mountain roads of the Pyrenees, past what remain of the chateaux of the Cathares. I was carsick so we stopped in lovely Ax-les-Thermes, a neat village of healing waters where I immediately found the toilet. I sat with my feet in the basin of healing waters in the town square, where St. Louis on his systematic massacre of the Cathares had established a refuge for leprous Crusaders. Then we drove through the Pyrenees, through rocky visages green and bright with mountain flowers, cattle feeding, we plunged into folded green valleys as clouds moved through them. By the time we crossed out of France at the formidable customs station, the sky was pure deep azure, the mountains great ridges of green. But descending into Andorra, heat and construction and commercialization spoiled the wild mountains, everywhere cigarettes at a discount. In Andorra we were assailed by a blast of international brands, with only traces of the local architecture of granite, and an old town council from the 16th c. We wandered en masse--the boys slack, the girls bristling with impatience at all the shopping to be done--to a very charming Catalan/Andorran/French restaurant--named los Menairos, after trolls who are kept in match boxes and do much mischief, like the trolls of Sardinia. We emerged after a long and heavy lunch under an oppressive sun, despite the wind. We crawled along the canal across a hideous white spider of a bridge, the Pont de Paris, found the obligatory duty-free whiskey and chocolate at Leclerc and walked in suffocating streets untempted by shopping.

St, Sernin, 11th c., Toulouse

On the drive back we stopped at St. Joan de Caselles, a 12th c Romanesque church of rough midi stone and timber, with a wide-eyed terra cotta Christ in Majesty of the 12th c. against a charming medieval fresco of the 14th c. A gothic 16th c. retable portrayed the strong characters often created by rural artists. We drove home through the magnificent Pyrenees, through portals and folding rocks to the deep green of the valley.

Our vacances familiales came to an end. We left Léran via Toulouse, with her easy grandeur and limpid edginess. There the magnificent Romanesque church St. Sernin, a major way station on the pilgrimage road, is a Romanesque masterpiece of enormous proportions. Her portal is perfect Byzantine bas-relief, while the vast indoor vault soothes with the warmth of the soft rose colored stone and the cool loftiness of the architecture, massive finely worked arches, and rhythmic receding layers of arches. Byzantine-like figures guard the crypt, whose interior like a stone flower, unfolding in perfect and mysteriously wrought symmetry.

St, Sernin, 11th c., Toulouse

We took the fast smooth train along the Canal du Midi and the flat and silky Garonne River, along the path of the doomed plane trees. Staunch and magnificent, these trees had been brought by Americans after World War II, and are now falling to an American disease, and will all, eventually, be chopped down.

For more on the Ariége, follow the link to an older piece I wrote last trip--

Jim Kreisman, 1951-2011

Jim Kreisman, school days

I owe it to Jim to remember him in these pages. I'm sad that he's gone, though we'd been writing each other for less than a year. He was a pretty loyal reader (and occasional editor) of this blog. And he was a kind of soul mate--born just a month before me.

I will share some fragments of our communication here. For he said that it was in emails that he spent his frustrated writing energy. I believe that he wouldn't mind my sharing them.

Like so much of my past, the memory of Jim was shaky when he began to write to me. Then it started to come back: Jimmy, in Latin class, in the backyard when he visited our dearest next door neighbors, the Kohms, his cousins. But it was the strength of his writing voice that fascinated me. Like so many childhood friend from University City, his words carried a pride in articulation, a depth of expression beyond the ordinary howdy-howdy of Facebook. We shared a quaint verbal snobbery that causes you to devote so many years to Latin.

Jim with our Latin teacher, Miss Patterson

He remembered me so well--it may be easier to remember when you remain in the world we grew up in. But he didn't really remain there--he'd spent years playing piano on cruise ships, and marveled that we could compare notes on Borobodur, for example. He wrote:

I used to keep extensive journals when I was doing my crazy backpacking sojourns in the late '70s - used to write every day. I treasure those, although I virtually never look at them. I don't think there's enough in them that is worthy of turning into a book, but some of the memories are very rich in my mind all these years later. One of my memories is of something I never did. I had a visa to go to Libya. The original goal of my trip was to visit the pyramids. After hanging around Europe, I went down to Morocco and slowly started making my way east. I made it as far as Tunisia. Had all the paperwork to take a train or something across Libya and into Egypt. But this was after 4 months on the road, and I was running out of energy, not to mention money. Since then, Libya has become a very hostile place for a traveler, and that is what makes me rue passing up the chance when I had it.
I did spend some time in Algeria, and I crossed over from Morocco in the south which was a most unusual border crossing. Have some great stories about that, but won't bore you! Let's just say they run the gamut from kids who had probably never seen a westerner throwing rocks at me to living the high life once I got up north to Oran, where the people couldn't have been nicer.

He loved Paris, too, where he studied piano as a graduate student.

    I have this fantasy of moving back to Paris and being one of those guys who sweep the streets with those straw brooms, if they still do that. Living in poverty in a poor quarter, hanging out at the local café. I don't know why my daydreams revolve around barely surviving and living in a poor area in some freezing garret on the fourth floor walk up. I imagine jobs are impossible to find now, esp. without a work permit.  The thought of living an upper class or upper middle class life in Paris doesn't appeal to me for some reason. I think I have some romantic vision of myself being in Paris during the French Revolution.
    Thanks for writing back!
Salut
Jim

The early morning street sweepers still work and laugh at dawn. I also love those early hours. That is when I walk through empty streets to the quai, to do tai chi in front of Notre Dame.

It was partly because of Jim's reminiscences that I began my blog with Hemingway's Paris, though it turned out he didn't like Hemingway. It was Henry Miller he loved. As he mentioned above, he also wrote---perhaps someone can unearth his old travel journals:

  I admire you being a writer - I am a frustrated one, and take out my writing energy on e mails. When I was much younger and life was more crazy, I used to keep a journal in the Kerouac style, hoping to turn it into a book, but frankly, I don't think I have what it takes to write a book. Writing a novel as you are doing is something I don't have in me.
    I used to write songs - probably nothing commercial. ... During this time (on board ship), the songs were just flowing out of me. Eventually (my girlfriend) met someone else while I was away at sea, and the sadness killed that creative part of my brain - strange how that works. Haven't written a song since.
    I apologize if I babbled on too long, but I always tell people they are not obligated to read my never-ending e mails.
    ...I crave a trip back to Paris to relive what I experienced when I was 20 years old, so I guess the grass is always greener ... Your description of the french psyche is most interesting - I think I got a taste of that when I was there, but of course, not to the extent you have been able to soak in.
Thanks again for writing - hope the weather cooperates with your travel in the coming days and weeks.
Jim

What strange journeys we have been on, class of 1969, University City High School. One old friend devoted his life to guitars, and sadly developed Parkinson's. Another ditched it all to become a song and dance man. Jim's guiding career principle was that he would only play the piano. He refused even to teach.

The so-called "recession" has starkly affected the amount of work I get - the last 3 years it's been  a pretty dramatic downturn. Whatever happens, I have managed to make it to age 59 and never had to teach (which I hate) and didn't spend the best 40 years of my life working in a job I hated. So who's to say 59 is not the same as 80 for a person who was miserable in their job, only to retire at 65 in declining health. I've never shied away from work - as long as it was performing music - it's just that there's not enough of it anymore to sustain life.

And he didn't even own a computer. But he owned his home in U City, and life brought adventures. He'd studied piano in Paris, and posted, on Facebook, charming black and white photographs of the 1970's city which has disappeared. Harkening back to those days, he mailed me a rigorous piano exercise book of a Polish Parisian named Mozkowski, with a note saying that he was happy that this part of his life would come home to Paris. Shortly after that he said he would stop writing, without giving any particular reason.

You're very welcome for the Mozkowski. I realize many of these may be beyond your current capabilities, but some that involved mostly single notes in either hand may be do-able. In any case, it might look nice on your piano music rack, if only you can figure out some way to erase my name on the cover page!

Thus in small ways he foreshadowed his end, without sharing why. He informed me a few times that he would stop writing. He also destroyed all his old mail, after revisiting it one more time. He was saying goodbye. He recounted to me---

I have been going through a lot of the letters written to me since about 1963, many to Art Kaufman, and even some of my own from the college years. Reading the old letters can be amusing, but also depressing, so it's kind of a Pandora's box of psychic tugs of war between entertaining and disheartening. I seldom get the box of letters out of the basement because I know they can be disturbing, but at 59 years old, I've decided to put some closure on the letters and dispose of them one way or the other. I shan't be delving into the box anymore. Yet I have no regrets for having saved them. Maybe ultimately I saved them for one last look as they offer an overview of certain years of my life. I think it's something we have sadly lost these days with e mails and tweets.
    But I came across a couple references about you which I would like to share.

Latin class, University City High School

    One was a letter I wrote to Art Kaufman in Jan. 1970. You had shown up at Webster College, where I was enrolled. In my letter I mention that we saw each other and I mentioned the possibility of getting stoned sometime. You seemed amenable, but I don't think it ever happened. The only other thing I wrote is that you told me Bennington wouldn't give you your money back so that was the reason you were at Webster. I don't think you were at Webster for more than a month or two. But there's something I never would have remembered without reading the old letter.
    The other one was a letter from my friend since Brittany Jr. High days - Joel Nadler. In high school he was sort of my "best friend" in one group, with  Art being in the same role in a different social circle of oddballs. Anyway, Joel had moved to Eugene before your father started working there, and sent me a newspaper clipping with a picture of him, and the article. The main thrust of the article was that he was the last to be interviewed, yet considered to be the #1 choice for the job. On the clipping, Joel scribbled "they should have put a picture of Louise instead." You may or may not remember Joel, but as I wrote you in my very first e mail, all the boys at U. City knew who YOU were. Joel had a famous father, Teddy Nadler, who won oodles of money on a quiz show in the '50's. He was a remarkable character whom I met many times.  He had something akin to a photographic memory and once he started talking and rambling on and on about dates, people, events, etc., you couldn't stop him.
Hope things are sailing along smoothly pour toi et Jacques.

Jim's last girlfriend had died tragically young, a few years before.

You're right that it's hard to maintain a relationship when you're gone for 4 months (playing piano on a cruise ship), but there is a tradition of it with men going off to sea. And my last girlfriend would work on the ships too, as a nurse,  but only one month contracts. When we were together, whether here or in Ottawa, it was 24 hours a day. We used to argue and have a lot of spats - something I had never experienced before. I like things to be cool and mellow. Or at least have a communications line going where you can work things out. She knew how to push my buttons. Finally I decided enough was enough - in 2005. In 2008 I got an e mail from her family that she had had a stroke and died. This is someone who was the model of health and lived life in moderation - too much sometimes. Her death affected me more than I thought it would - ex post facto. She loved camping and we did a lot of tent camping, including in the Pacific Northwest. The odd thing was that she still lived wih her parents, despite the fact that she had been married for a couple years in the '80s. Living back home when you're in your 40's is never a good sign. When we were getting kind of serious and talking about marriage, her conditions would be that we would not only have to live in Canada - but in Ottawa. This is a city of only one million people and while the St. Louis region has 3 million, it's hard enough to find work. I actually was willing to compromise and consider moving to Toronto - the key word is consider - but that wasn't an option for her.

So she was gone, the same year he lost his cat. And with all these intimations of closure, Jim opened up a vivid life on Facebook, with touching and lively photos of his life and travels, like the picture of the beautiful tiger cub in Thailand.

 I have a great photo of myself holding a tiger cub at a place in Thailand, near Sri Racha. I have always loved cats, am a cat person no doubt. My last cat only lived 12-1/2 years and got sick 3 years ago this exact same time of year and died within about a week. I can't see going through that again, plus, at my age, I wouldn't want the cat to outlive me and have to deal with a new living environment. So I feed some strays - mainly one male tom cat. He is not socialized to humans, and won't let me pet him, but we have reached an understanding.
    Probably nature is my favorite thing. I feed the birds, and every late summer/fall, the hummingbirds come through here and I get a lot of joy from that. Once in a while I see something unusual, like a groundhog, or a snake, and those are some of the magical moments of life. I'd like to be remembered as "Mother Nature's Son" like the Beatles title, although it sounds pompous to put that in writing. The song of an unfamiliar bird can send me into ecstacy. That's why I eschew living in big cities. At the same time, I never realized my dream of living in a cabin out in the woods. Living in New York is something I never aspired to. Paris always seemed more elegant and less threatening.
Çiao
Jim

Funny, the sound of birdsong can also send me into ecstasy. In fact at this moment I sit in the south of France, in Jacques' tiny home village, where birdsong is so thick and exuberant. And I feel sad for the United States, for all the birds that are being poisoned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for the sake of big ag. But I am lucky to be here, now. I am lucky that Jim was my friend near the end, for nearly a year. He was nearby, inside my computer, but very far away. He shared his dreams--

My ultimate dream, which I don't think I'm going to attain in this lifetime, would be to live in a country cabin with a woman who was on the same wavelength as I.
(Keep them blogs a comin'!)
Jim

and gave me advice--

Sounds like you are trying to do it all. I'm loathe to give advice, but if you're a writer - if your brain is hard wired that way - you'll spend your time writing and the rest will fall away. If you're an actress, your energy will go into that. If you're an artist, you draw or paint or sculpt.  If you're a musician, you'll do that primarily.  If you want to be an "artist" in the general sense, make that your passion and your primary motivation. Whew! Who am I to give advice? I was lucky to find my "calling" at a very young age, and it didn't involve teaching. (I'm still trying to rationalize that to you.)
    And all your political involvements are great - I admire that more than you know. But don't let the computer and causes get in the way of other pursuits that might be more soul-satisfying. If there is anyone that can do it all - it's you - but I believe there are limits. If I were you I'd toss the computer out the window onto the rue Thénard. Hah!
    I am willing to admit you are my intellectual superior - and it's refreshing to be communicating with someone like you. My e mails might start to peter out a little bit now because I feel like the time you spend writing me could be better used to develop your artistic side. I am eternally grateful for your e mails. Getting in touch with you was an amazing and unexpected joy in my life.
Avec affection
Jim

Gratitude has a special nobility. There have been other moments in my life when I have spent time with someone about to die. I have felt a glow, something about being near the near-dead. Or is that my imagination? Is that only in retrospect?

Jim and I are almost exactly the same age--he's a month older. Beyond the vastly different life experiences we've had, there are so many qualities we share. He seemed so alone, just as I have been struggling with my foreign transplantation. There are some steep prices to pay for my apparently fortunate life in Paris and world travel. Steep prices to any relationship, really. I am struggling with a "famille recomposée", required to play a difficult role and on French terms. Jim chose instead freedom and solitude. Jacques and I were just getting into therapy during these conversations, and Jim wished us luck.

But maybe he didn't really. Maybe he thought it would be better if I came back home.

I am sitting in the garden, writing. A little songbird keeps circling closer to me. It has a golden breast and bright, curious eye. It's tiny. It matches the magnolia tree. I whistle to it, and it lands near, then takes off. I move into the sun, and there it comes. Circling in, watching me. Over and over. Is that you, Jim?