My buddy

 

In the late 1980s, I was in the American Library in Toulouse, researching a novel I wanted to write. It would be about the daughter that Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley had. There was a historical reference about two of them being entranced by a little girl.

I never wrote that novel but 17 others. 

What I did make was a buddy, a man sitting at the same long table. The library didn't have carrels. He had gone to university in Boston so we felt a connection, not a romantic one, but an interest one. He was currently in France with his family on sabbatical from teaching at a Montreal University.

Our research days would often overlap. When we were done, we'd go for coffee at a café near the Saint-Sernin Basilique. We spent the time discussing books in-depth the way I hadn't done since leaving university among other conversational topics. His wife invited me and the family I was staying with for dinner many times.

It was not the best time for me despite being in the early stages of my lifelong dream of living and writing in France. The job hunt was NOT going well. The living situation, while I adored the kids, was less than wonderful. In fact, many decades later, I consider the girl my French daughter, but that's another story.

My library/coffee buddy stopped by the house where I was living just after I received a letter from my mother, with whom I did not get along, that she had throat cancer. I told him, I didn't think I would go home. I had breezed through the grief of my father's death. I would do it again with my mother.

He didn't agree. He told me I should go home. "Losing someone with whom you've unresolved issues, is harder than losing some with which there's no left disagreements."

He was right. I did go home. It probably saved me years of counseling to come to grips with my relationship with my mother rather than leaving it until it was too late.

I've stayed in touch with my buddy over the years. Sometimes it's months and months or more without a contact.

He and his wife divorced. He moved to China. Once when he was in Europe he stayed with my daughter in Stuttgart. I met up with him in Boston, Geneva and Argelès every few years. He was one of those people, we pick up as if he we had coffee at the Saint-Sernin Basilique the day before.

He was just here for two days and stayed in our Nest, the studio I bought for retirement. Rick and I now use it as our guest room. We live in the Warren, a two-bedroom flat two doors down. We met mornings for coffee, lunch at the beach, and an apèro early evening.

Saturday, today we had lunch in the Warren before he caught a train for Paris then home to Vancouver. 

I have no idea when or if we will meet up again. It doesn't matter with Facebook messages from time to time.

He brought back the moments of time shared in Toulouse, sometime the only good ones. His advice about dealing with loss I've passed onto my daughter and others. 

Relationships are funny things with depths colored by events and circumstances. The ones based on friendship and honesty no matter how they are triggered add a dimension to life as the MasterCard ad says are "priceless."