“You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the central expanding trunk.’
Mary McCarthy
Larée
A very dear friend of mine died suddenly a month ago. She was one of the first women I met when I moved to Seattle twenty-five years ago. We saw each other as often as we could, and we’d just had lunch the week before her death. At lunch we talked about her coming to visit me in France the following summer. She was very excited. I know she would have loved the variety of people and places. We shared a love of language and collected quotes, poetry, jokes and favorite passages from books to read to each other. With a facetious twinkle in her eye, she usually said after a joke she’d made, “Ha! Be suspicious of joy, it strikes when you least expect it.!” It’s become one of my favorite lines. She would have celebrated her birthday next week. This blog is dedicated to her.
Paris
“I always feel like a traveler, going somewhere towards some destination. If I sense that this destination doesn’t exist, that seems to me quite reasonable and very likely true.”
VIncent Van Gogh
Paris
“The best that we find in our travels are friends. We travel,indeed, to find them. They are the end, the reward. They keep us worthy of ourselves and when we are alone,we are only nearer to the absent.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Cutxan
“Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death. Indeed, it’s our most unique act along with birth. We must think of it as cooking breakfast, it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin after the fluids have drained, or better yet, slide into the fire. Of course, it’s a little hard to accept your last kiss, your last drink, your last meal about which the condemned can be quite particular… A few lovers sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid lake at dawn,mist rising , a solitary loon call, and staring into the still opaque water. We’ll know as children again all that we are destined to know, that the water is cold and deep and the sun penetrates only so far.”
Jim Harrison
Aux Arbeils
We have invented heaven. What better place for our friends to go.
