Dan

When someone dies at 91, you can't say it is untimely. When that someone used to be a neighbour and friend that you no longer see regularly, that doesn't stop you from feeling sad and remembering not going to Algeria together because we couldn't get a visa to travel through the dessert to search for cave paintings, but travelling around Europe instead and still having a good time.

You can remember exchanging writing, having meals together, and his telling you the history of the bas relief on a column in a convent in Elne.

It doesn't stop a flood of memories when we had rented a grey car in Southern France and we decided to remember that the last two numbers of the license were 66 only to discover that all plates in the region ended in 66 and walking around and around the parking lot and putting a key into every grey car that faintly resembled our rental and laughing about it.

It doesn't stop me from sitting with his ex-wife tonight who also feels sad and remembering how both of them didn't make anyone chose sides in the divorce and that the sadness of the divorce was that they both wanted such different things that the sacrifice of the other would have destroyed what remained of a love.

It doesn't stop the memory of his phone call to France when he remarried to a woman when they were both in their sixties to share the news and his laughing when my lover at the time asked "Do they HAVE to get married? Is she pregnant?"

It doesn't stop the memory of meeting him and his new wife at the Lausanne train station and a great weekend in Payerne with my Swiss lover.

It doesn't stop the memory of his ringing my bell when I lived on The Riverway and announced himself as a character in a book I was writing.

What does stop is the chance to share just a bit more silliness and ideas and that a little piece of the past is gone never to return and that makes me sad.