With time...

It's been difficult days, these.

Last year about this time, three things happened nearly simultaneously.

One of the members of our French/English Conversation Group suddenly stopped coming.  We found out much later that she'd been having stomach problems.  After many doctors visits a surgeon opened her up, took one look, sewed her closed and sent her home to die.  Six months later she was no longer with us.

As we were heading out one day I stopped to talk with a woman who lived in our apartment building.  We'd been on friendly terms for years and it was she who recommended a boulangerie that made a true bon pain.  I knew she'd been battling cancer and she was particularly out of breath and weak that day.  We talked a bit so she could gather her energy.  Soon, another apartment owner joined the conversation.  Since they were both headed upstairs our recent conversation joiner offered to take the woman's groceries up.  We said our goodbyes and I never saw the woman again.  She died less than a month after that conversation.

The woman's husband was conversational with Jude and I over the years.  One day I saw him driving into the parking garage in a pretty Jaguar saloon.  I told him I thought he had excellent taste.  He smiled and told me a bit about the car.  Six months after his wife had died, we heard from another apartment owner in our building that the husband, too, had died.  He'd been in excellent health, but had taken his wife's passing so hard that he was gone a month after his wife.

That was 2018.

Come 2019 and we have further news.

A Canadian friend announced she has breast cancer.  An old friend of Jude's who we just saw right here in Paris announced he has bone cancer.  And a family member broke the news the very same month as our two friends that she, too, has what turned out to be a very aggressive breast cancer.  All three people sound positive and the outcomes in each case appears to be well into the 90 percent survivability range.

Still, all this news is getting a bit difficult to take.

Then, just this morning, I received some bad news about a friend's father.

When I was young and growing up in Dana Point, I had a great friend who I used to pal around with.  My father was in aerospace, and his father was, too.  My father worked on putting a man on the moon with TRW, and his worked on managing large deep space exploration projects out of JPL.

I enjoyed talking with my friend's father.  He had fun stories about growing up in the mid-west and learning to drive the dirt roads that the booze-runners turned NASCAR drivers used to use.  He talked about drifting a car through the corners and how to use the throttle to control the car's attitude and to never ever touch the brakes.

One day my friend asked me if I'd like to go with he and his father to Riverside International Speedway to take in a race.  Not knowing exactly what I was getting myself into I said sure.

Raceday arrived and I found myself in the backseat of a 1965 Pontiac 389ci GTO convertible.  The top was down and the sun was out.  Off we went and we were soon on the Ortega Highway headed east.  It's the road that still runs from San Juan Capistrano up over the mountain range and down into Elsinore.   The road is famous, now, for it's fast lower section and very twisty upper sections.

That morning I got a driving lesson that I will never forget.

A '65 GTO is a big car.  It has a bit of horsepower, too.

Mind you, my father was a purely law abiding citizen and wherever he took us, we always were driving at or under the speed limit and in complete security and safety.  Speed, by these standards, was for reckless people.

The sun beat down as we reached the lower portion of the Ortega Highway.  Suddenly it felt as if the Hand of Gawd ...  Damned we're going fast!!! The wind roared around my ears as I tried to assimulate what just happened.  I'd never been driven this fast.  Ever.  What was the speedo indicating?  That can't be right.  110MPH?  No.  Not possible.

As the GTO quickly gobbled up the straighaway we found ourselves starting to negotiate the first turn at a speed I was convinced would kill us far too early in our young and yet to be mis-spent youth.

Holy Moly!  The car is sliding gently sideways and I'm sliding down the rear seat toward the other side.  Time to dig the hands between the gaps in the seat to try and find something to hold on to.  Seat belts, obviously, weren't standard equipment.

And so it was.  Fast on the straights.  Slide through the corners.  Up over hill and dale.

I think my friend turned to look at me at one point.  I seem to recall him saying he'd never seen me so white before.  I know he was immensely proud of his father.

For myself, it took awhile for the experience to sink in.  All I remember is being very happy when we reached the freeway.  65mph seemed sedate compared with what I'd just been through.  But soon enough I found I, too, enjoyed the sensations of driving at speed.

Laws be damned!

A year or two ago my friend contacted me to say his mother had passed.  She'd been particularly hard on her son and we simply noted her passing.  My friend and I have stayed in close contact since then.

Which leads us to today.  My friend's father was found some days after his passing.  The police needed to break into the house.  It's not the circumstances that bother me.  It's the knowing how much my friend's father helped shape my view of cars and speed and science and engineering and space exploration.

This man is one who contributed in innumerable ways to the vast library of human knowledge and has himself just reached the speed of light.


  Me and my car, some years after  the Trip to Riverside International Speedway

As she once was...

In memory...

She's dead...

I feel like I did when editors of Charlie Hebdo were murdered.  I feel like I did when Paris was assulted and far too many people died, including many who were at the Bataclan that night.

This is the place where the first island settlers built a temple to their river gods.

This is the place where the Romans built their own temple not long after the Parisii.

This was the place where Our Lady gave King Arthur the ermine cloak that blinded his adversary during the mano a mano fight with the Roman Frollo.

This is the place where  King Arthur then built his church to honor Our Lady.

This is the place where Saint Genevieve sealed a deal with Clovis to protect Paris against attacks from the Germanic hordes.

This is the place where giant chains were strung across the river to keep the marauding Normans out of the city.

This is the place where the alchemists mounted their bas relief plaques that were used to educate later generations in the making of the Elixir and instructing how to enter knowledge as the means of saving one's soul, including educating Nicolas Flamel, Fulcinelli, and a certain Nazi spy who came to see if he could steal the secret of making gold that would be used to fill party coffers.

This is where medieval revelers ended their naked bacchanalian Festival of the Donkey parades.

This is where the Festival of Fools was celebrated until the Church outlawed the inversion of authority (even if it was only for a day).

This is the place where hungry wolves were cornered and killed after entering the old city through a breech in the fortifications.

This is where the Philosopher's Stone was buried and the crow as sculpted to look at it from afar.

This is where the Church, fearful of so many things, had the beautiful statue of Saint Joseph carrying Jesus destroyed.

1789 revolutionaries nearly destroyed this place in their search for raw materials used to finance their war against the Prussians.

This is the place where Napoleon crowed himself while Bishops of Paris and Rome looked on and huge tapestries covered the damage caused by the revolutionaries.

This is the place that was rebuilt, in part due to Victor Hugo's wonderful history.

This is the place Charles de Gaule was nearly sniped as he calmly walked across the open space to celebrate the liberation of France at the end of World War II.

This is the place that today starting a 19h00 local time experienced a crisis of unimaginable horror and 30 minutes later, died.

I feel as hollowed out as Notre Dame de Paris now is.

A historian reminds us that these kinds of building are living, changing.  She's burned before and she'll in all likelyhood burn again.  She's been expanded, updated, changed, destroyed, changed some more, nearly destroyed time and again.  Each time we rebuild her.

The only sadness is that work and restoration will likely take longer than I have left on this earth.  Still, we saw her as she once was.  And that will have to do.