PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW…

After I’ve come home again from a significant journey, the people who care about me, who really want to know when they ask a question… who don’t ask questions just to fill spaces in conversation… after they’ve got some of the details about where and what, ask, “What do you want to remember most, what is it you really don’t want to forget?”

On the way home from Paris yesterday, I asked myself that question.  Of course, I don’t want to forget the time spent with old friends and the pleasure of the acquaintance and company of new friends, but the tighter I squeezed my brain to remember what I’d seen and experienced, I settled on trying to secure indelibly some small things that have a way of slipping through the cracks of my memory.  Of course, I have photographs to remind me, so it became a  fairly easy question.  I’ve been to France several times going all the way back to 1971, and the BIG places are stuck forever in my mind; but I decided I’ll try very hard not for forget some little things… like the short bursts of delicious laughter that erupted often from mealtime conversations with friends like the little celebration of Dorsey’s birthday at La Couronne down the street from the Cathedral and across from the Joan of Arc memorial in Rouen and:

the speckled starling  that hopped onto the fence as I looked from the Eiffel Tower side of the River Seine back across at Le place du Trocadéro;

the cat that came out to greet Margaret on the winding stairs at Conflans-Saint-Honorine;

A little ground cherry that I picked off the top of my dessert one night at dinner;

A small hand-painted mural that shows two little girls writing “Please no more war… Love” on a wall off the main square in Arromanches; 

reflections of multistoried medieval buildings in the small bay in the center of Honfleur;

the way Margaret looked standing in the light of a plain window near the stairs of the chapel at Abbaye de St-Wandrille;

a tiny blue flower, two perfectly constructed cobwebs suspended from a simple shrub in bright sunlight, and a snail crawling up a wooden wall in Monet’s garden in Giverney;

a little scruffy dog I met in Vernon;

the sommelier at Beaune;

Goat number 20037 on a goat farm near Abbaye Cluny;

a large bronze sculpture of a handgun with its barrel tied in a know outside a the World War II Resistance Museum in Lyon;

the baguettes that reminded me of Patrick at a market in Lyon;

Jeffery, Daniel, Kaye, and Gary;

the row of plane trees (sycamore) in Viviers;

a donkey I met at the place where Van Gogh spent a lot of time painting sunflowers, olive trees, and people;

a drainpipe dripping water onto some oak leaves in Avignon;

some purple shutters on a five-hundred-old building in Tarascon.

And now back home again

in His Backyard

we celebrate today

PATRICK'S BIRTHDAY