Making Money in France

My father was born in 1904, and I was born 42 years later.  For many years when I was young, I tried to catch him up.  I chased after him, having stitched together for myself a pair of patchwork sneakers, made of pieces of life I understood and pieces I did not, which served to keep my feet protected as I ran. 

 

In 1904, in Paris, urban development created the conditions by which the City of Light would become even more the center of European art than it already was.  Having become so much more the center, by 1928, it would also be a target for my father, allowing him to explore its demimondaine enticements.  Here’s what happened in 1904.  Paris’ boulevard Raspail led south from boulevard du Montparnasse and out of the city.  In 1904, urban development “crossed the T” and cut boulevard Raspail through boulevard du Montparnasse, so that it ran northward also.  This made what had always been a quiet neighborhood much easier to find. 

 

The artists who had subsisted in that neighborhood because it was cheap found their way northward into Paris’ heartland, and those on the Right Bank who wanted to find them were now able to do so, by strolling south.  Picasso settled in Paris in 1904.  Modigilani was there.  Braque was there.  The Steins were there by 1905.  The Dome café, of which many expatriate Americans were habitués, is on the corner of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Monparnasse.  I don’t know if Dad ever hung around at the Dome, though it seems likely.  Later, wearing my sneakers, I did. 

 

The Dome is the single location at which I ever made any money in France. 

 

It was 1965, and I was very conscious of being on the terrace of the Dome.  I was alone, and in Paris for the first time, and in love with that fact.  My French was almost non-existent, but after four years of prep school and college Spanish—and after several recent weeks wandering in Spanish Morocco—I was exceedingly pleased to be told by a Dome waiter that he assumed I must, indeed, be Spanish, for I spoke my hesitant French with that sort of accent. 

 

Hot stuff!

 

            So there I was, sitting in the sun, wearing a turtleneck and a beret.  I was mustachioed, like Hemingway, and I was drinking vin very ordinaire, like Modigliani…absinthe unfortunately having been discontinued as poisonous some years before.  I was reading (trying to read) a French newspaper, as I had seen photographs of Proust doing…though of course his table should have been set for tea and madeleines. 

 

At the table next to mine sat an American couple of Midwestern middle-age, enjoying their European vacation.  I had overheard them trying to make themselves plain when ordering, but I had scorned, of course, to assist them in any way.  Certainly, they were no fellow countrymen of mine!

 

            After a time, I realized that the wife of the couple was trying to catch my eye.  I deigned to give her a slight nod, whereupon she rose and made her way to my table.  She did her best to communicate that she desired to sit at my table and to have our photograph taken by her husband.   After all—this was the Dome, and I was evidently an artist of some kind, and here we were in Paris.  Once I managed to grasp her meaning—her French was poor and, after all, we had no English—I gravely allowed that this might be permissible. 

 

The thing arranged itself.  She sat; her husband manipulated the camera.  Voila!  It was done.      

           

            Her thanks were profuse, and in them her husband joined.  I was gracious, though cool. 

 

            “Harry,” she whispered, nudging her husband, “he wants some money.  Give him some money.”

 

            Harry had the obligingness to reach into his pocket and to withdrew a five franc coin.  He offered it to me, and, with a condescension that became me very well, I accepted it. 

 

            I had a career! 

 

I ordered another vin, and the sun smiled down on the intersection of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Montparnasse.  Later in the day, I would order an omelette jambon avec pomme frites (which is all I ate for ten days because it was all I knew how to say), and the evening would come on with a smatter of new faces, like petals on a wet black bough.  (Pound’s phrase, not mine; but apropos.)

 

I believe Toulouse Lautrec, in his disinterest, would have enjoyed me with a sharp pencil.  (Another steal, slightly altered, from Dad this time.)

 

            As a nineteen-year-old, I was in Paris chasing after my father but, at the same time, looking for something to say of my own.  I wanted to stop stealing phrases.  I wanted to say something that hadn’t been said before.  Back in the States, though, I spent most of my time on stage.  Being there was the safest place I could find.  Since, alas, I had no lines of my own to say—and maybe, I despaired, I never would have—I strove to say Shakespeare’s, or Ibsen’s, or Chekhov’s, or Bolt’s at least well.  For example, as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya, I was required to declare love for, and sensuously to kiss, a faculty-wife actress whom I found particularly attractive.  I had managed to kiss a girl or two of my own age before then, but this was the big time.  Eight performances; eight masterful kisses.  (Plus rehearsals!) 

 

I loved the theater; it gave me experience without requiring of me responsibility. 

 

As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to meet girls in Paris.  Indeed, there were many, many girls in Paris—quite lovely to look at.  Many of them came up and desired to meet me, for a fee.  But in Paris it was hard to find words to say of my own.  I had no pal to go around with, and that may account for it.  I had Paris, and I had a career, but I was mute. 

 

            Years and years before, while peddling south out of Paris on his way to Provence, Dad had “felt a very god,” as he put it.  He wasn’t very much older than I was, but he was already a songster entire. 

 

 

******

 

Reach me directly, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com.

 

 

 

 

God's Day Planner

One of the things I like about God is that He’s got all the time in the world. 

Of course, we don’t.  A friend called me.  He asked if I could help with a project around his house.  “Of course,” I reassured him.  “I’ve got all the time in the world.” 

No.

Here’s another sort of call any one of us parents might receive; friends of mine did receive it.  (Names changed.)

 

                                                                        *****

November, 2011.

“Hello, this is Officer Gary Boudreau of the Pennsylvania State Police.  I’m trying to reach William Jacobson.”

Nothing good can come from a telephone call that begins that way.  At first it seemed that nothing good did come from this particular telephone call. 

Their daughter, in her thirties.  Car accident.  Massive injuries including severe brain trauma.  Survival itself unknown at present.  Hundreds of miles from home.  Hospital.  Unconscious.  Falling into coma.   

Airplane.  Rental car.  Hospital directions.  Mother and father—don’t stop.  Don’t stop!

There she is.  Tubes, bandages, monitors, personnel in white, hushed sounds…she’s breathing, not dead.  Carefully phrased professional statements that cannot, of course, reassure.    

Angela’s mother, Sarah Jacobson, effectively moved to Pennsylvania, with occasional trips back to Maine.  Bill Jacobson, Angela’s father, lived as a bachelor, with trips when possible to Pennsylvania. 

Agonizing, day after day.  Some progress, then no progress, then falling back, then a favorable therapy report, then dashed hopes of change, then some hope…but muted, careful, cautious. 

Time ticks so slowly! 

Time ticks so slowly!

Here’s a thing that Bill said, during church, when asked for the latest up-date by our pastor.  “Sarah says she wishes we could flip the pages forward in God’s Day Planner, and see.”  He hesitated and then continued.  “Me?  I want to flip the pages back to the day before the accident, and stop there.”

Here’s what Sarah did.  Every day, from the very beginning, late in the evening, she sat at her computer and filed a report on Angela’s progress through the website www.carepages.com.  Every single day.  She told all of us what had happened that day—yes, no, or maybe.  She transcribed a biblical passage which had made a difference for her that day, or a devotional of some kind.  Sometimes, she wrote out a hymn or a psalm.  Sometimes she described a meeting with another parent or patient or medical professional or interested person who was either willing to, or eager to, learn about our dependence on the grace of the Lord. 

We all read Sarah’s pages, and our prayer circle grew, and the Comment postings assured the Jacobsons that prayers for strength and hope were pouring in their direction, and that prayers for Angela’s rapid healing were pouring in God’s direction.  Our Comments postings were detailed, and fervent. 

Angela emerged from her coma. 

Our Internet prayer circle became enormous, far larger than the members of our church.  Our Comment postings began to include new understanding, which we gained as we prayed for, and with, the Jacobsons.  We felt strongly Sarah’s desire to flip forward in God’s Day Planner and Bill’s to flip back, but we were taught patience by what came across as the calm in Sarah’s writing.  Oh, her posts might go on for a week with a tone of frustration and fret, but even those postings included a biblical injunction to wait, to wait…to allow God time for His miracle, if He cared to provide one, this time.

Angela could sit on her bed now, with assistance.  She could talk a little.  She could not swallow.  She didn’t understand clearly what had happened and why she was not in Maine. 

For every thing there is a purpose under Heaven.  Even, there is a purpose in a parent’s worst fear. 

We who prayed began to realize that we were witness both to a miracle (thank the Lord) but, maybe more so, to a lesson.  God had a happy thing for us to learn, too, despite the fact that we did not want to learn it.  Properly, we were awestruck by the excellence of the medical attention made available to Angela.  Gradually, however, we were struck with awe at the integrity of God’s message to us…I will do what I will do; My will be done. 

It is His will, not ours, that prevails. 

One day, Angela, who before the accident had exercised a strong will for control, but afterwards had not, was taken for a drive, and the road surface was bumpy and rough.  From the backseat, suddenly, out of her annoyance, the forceful Angela cried out, “Stop the bumps!”  Perhaps one thousand readers of the post that night wept for the glory of God; I certainly did. 

After more than half a year, it was time for Angela to come home to Maine.  She knew where she was and wanted no more of Pennsylvania.  She wanted Maine…and as soon as possible lobster and blueberries to eat.  Really eat.  She would zip around, first in her wheelchair and then later with her walker, frustrated that she could not really eat. 

Her travel had been cleared by Pennsylvania’s professionals, and arrangements had been made for her continued therapy at Maine’s premier facility for brain trauma, River Ridge, located in Kennebunk. The one missing piece was locating a nearby place for Sarah to stay (and an inexpensive one—Kennebunk is a pricey real estate environment), since Sarah expected to continue to be nearby to their daughter through most of her remaining therapy time. 

Here’s news: God uses the Internet!

I do not often experience a direct instruction from God.  Maybe I receive them, but I am infrequently aware of them as such, and I miss His instruction; the more abject I. 

Often busy, now and then I skip a Sarah update, especially as Angela began to improve.  One morning, I saw the email announcing Sarah’s latest post, but I skipped it.  There was another email, more important I thought, to which I must attend.  I poised my mouse over that other email, but a voice came in my head. 

I mean this literally—a voice, in my head.  “Dikkon, open Sarah’s.  NOW.” 

In Sarah’s post, she asked if anyone could assist with finding an accommodation nearby to the Kennebunk facility.  Because of my former sales career, I know hundreds of lawyers in Maine, and they are all on my email lists.  I thought, ‘Sure. I’ll try.’  It took 10 minutes to write a cover, to identify the Jacobsons and their situation anonymously, to cut part of Sarah’s post and paste it into my message, and then to send my email request to about one hundred lawyers.  Within 15 minutes, I had two solid leads.  Within another 10 minutes, because my message had been re-sent by several lawyer recipients to their lists, the Lord had made the necessary connection…my phone rang.  It was a woman calling from Vermont who just that week had advertised in Kennebunk for a renter/helper at her comfortable home next door to the treatment facility, where she lives with her young children and has more space than she needs. 

I emailed the contact to Sarah in Pennsylvania, who immediately called the woman in Vermont, and 40 minutes after I opened Sarah’s post, the deal was done…provisionally, pending a personal meeting and the conclusion of details.  It has worked beautifully ever since. 

 

                                                                        *****

November, 2012. 

Several weeks ago, Bill and Sarah and Angela attended a church dinner!  Angela’s first time this far from a facility. 

Angela is as pretty as always, alert, interested, and she chatted with many of us in a slow but a comfortable way.  One year ago, even if she were to survive at all, it might well have been that she would be permanently comatose.  Today, she stays close to her parents, has a small walker for assistance, has tape on the outside edges of her glasses lenses to remind her eyes to work hard…but she’s eating at least some real food and usually laughs at the inconveniences of recovery. 

She’s looking forward, finally, to being at home.  

 

                                                                        *****

With Sarah, one year ago, if I had been given the power to flip forward in God’s Day Planner, I would have done so in a minute.  I would have seen Angela back at the church, in one year.  I would have been enormously relieved, and I would have high-fived the entire Jacobson family and their extended clan.   

But I wouldn’t have learned anything. 

God, who has all the time in the world, knows how to teach us, who don’t.  His teaching works best when we take some of our time, which we think we control, to listen. 

I thank God for Angela’s accident—among the very worst events any parent or child can encounter, and which I do not at all wish upon anyone—because the events that surrounded it during the past three hundred sixty-five days have forced all of us out of ourselves and into the hands of the Lord. 

Let’s all of us try to stay there, this time, and not force Him do it again to get His message across. 

 
*****

Reach me, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com.
 

 

Memory...Ascending

My theme is the ache of memory.  We all ache, do we not? 

We ache with wistful homesickness for unity that was ours before.

 

I

 

     I coach Special Olympics basketball; one of my sons, Sam, has Down syndrome.

 

     Recently, my best power forward slammed into me as I was defending against his lay-up and knocked me over backwards.  I knew I was going down, and hard; muscle memory kicked back in. 

 

     I adjusted while in the air, with my chin tucked into my chest and both knees drawn hard up into my gut.  I hit the court and carried the momentum of the roll backwards.  As my hips crossed above my head, I thrust down hard against the court surface with my elbow, while snapping my legs straight in the direction that had been behind me.  The enhanced momentum pushed me onto my left foot and right knee, and I still had enough motion to roll me upright onto both feet. 

 

     I took one adjusting step backwards, and—two seconds after I was hit—I was vertical, balanced, and amazed. 

 

     So was everyone else. 

 

     Yow!  My elbow and knee hurt. 

 

     “Are you okay?  Are you okay?”  Michael, my forward, was in agony for me. 

 

    “Fine.  Fine.  Fine.”  I shook it off, didn’t even look at the shrieking joints. 

 

    The drill went on.  I defended the next three players and then called in another coach—who looked at me wide eyed—and I went to count if we had enough blue jerseys for the upcoming scrimmage.  Only then, surreptitiously, did I check my elbow and knee; no blood; okay.

 

    Panting.   

 

    What just happened? 

 

    Had I actually done a complete backwards somersault and come up onto my feet in a single fluid motion without stopping?  And lived to tell about it?  Elbow and knee notwithstanding? 

 

     Wow!  Some man!

 

     Wish my wife had seen it. 

 

     But it probably would have scared her to death. 

 

     When I told the other of my sons about it that afternoon, he had the best comment.  “Dad, that muscle memory was from muscles you had when you were eighteen on the football field.  I’m glad you still have the memory, but at sixty-five, you don’t have the muscles!”

 

      He was right.  By then, everything hurt. 

 

 

II

 

 

     The next day, along with a crowd of people, my wife and I jammed into a small independent bookstore which specializes in poetry, after its hours.  We were there for a book publishing party.  One of Sam’s song/poems and two of his illustrations were included among the fifty-four pieces in a newly published poetry anthology.

 

     The owner of the bookstore, a poet himself, officiated at the reading, and a good time was had by all.  Sam read his piece with expression, and—as he deserved—he got laughs…it’s a song about chicken pox, funny in its own right and funnier still in his reading.    

 

     I hurt, stiff from the somersault and from the explosion of muscle memory. I stood in the background, enjoying the excitement of the poets as much as I did the delight on my wife’s face.    

 

     Sam and several of the other poets are among my basketball players; all these poets have limited intellectual capacity, but, as their poetry proves, their emotional and communicative powers are strong.  I love these men and women.  I love them as athletes for their joy to increase their ball-handling skill and their strategic concept of the game.  Just so, I love them for their urgency to set down their stories and their emotions in verse. 

 

     Leaving Down syndrome aside, Sam is like his grandfather, my father.  My father died in 2005 at 101, but Sam knew my father well, and they were easy together.  I’m grateful for that.  They shared unwillingness to see badness or meanness as fundamental in others.  They shared contentment in quiet, just sitting and leaning against one another, not needing to talk.  They shared urgency in their creative arts—my father, who kept turning out the verse through sixty creative years, Sam, principally, with his paintings, but also with his verse, too.  They shared joyful dreaminess: their poetic minds. 

 

     There—among a supportive crowd of newly published writers in a shop filled with thin books of poetry by the best of that art—there was Sam, reading his piece.  Handsome, slender, youthfully energetic, he was the very spit of photographs from my father’s time.  My father’s poetic beginning was in England, at Cambridge University, among other lyricists of his day.  There—and for the rest of his life—he read to whatever audience should come before him.  At his beginning, often, it was in another such small book shop filled with thin volumes; later, it was before crowds of hundreds.  Sam may not make a career of poetry; realistically speaking, not.  Dad went on to sixty years of poet laureateships and major literary prizes and honorary degrees, published thirty volumes of poetry and criticism, was a literary king-maker, and enjoyed accolades from both sides of the Atlantic.    

 

    Seeing Sam reading in this place, it brought tears to my eyes, my memory of family tradition.  Here was this particular one of Dad’s grandsons standing, as it were, in his shoes.  As much as my body hurt from muscle memory, my family feeling was hurt that Dad should not have experienced this scene, too.

 

     My theme, as I said, is the ache of memory.  We ache with wistful homesickness for unity that was ours before. 

 

 

III

 

 

     Today, I woke up early, to pray.  It was three o’clock in the morning.  I prayed until four o’clock and then fell back to sleep. 

 

    Here’s what I prayed about.  We have friends in our church community who are in dire need of prayers right now.  We have a nation which is in dire need of prayer right now; today we are holding the 2012 American presidential election.  We have people in the wider world, whom I do not know, who are in dire need of prayers right now.  I prayed as best I could for our specific local persons, and for our national circumstance, and for those others, farther flung, as well. 

 

    The ache I ached is for our missing unity. 

 

    We, we all of us, we have a piece missing from the inside of us.  It’s a vital piece.  Augustine and others told us about this situation, so we are validated by the wisdom of these former thinkers, and we share with them our melancholic state of being…and our longing for salvation in its stead.      

 

     At eighteen, chasing down the gridiron after a punt, I dodged and wove and somersaulted past defenders and made the open field tackle and crowed with the cheering crowd…and did not hurt afterwards.  At sixty-five, a sudden backwards somersault made me hurt.  The loss of my father, though he was 101 when we lost him, makes me hurt.  As a youngster, I listened as he “sang” his poems—I sensed that his words hung in the air as though they had been there always, by their perfection tying us back to the beginning of time.  At sixty-five, it hurt me that my father did not observe Sam as he read before the crowd. 

 

     We yearn backwards, do we not? 

 

     From us there is that missing piece.  There is that hole right at the middle of our…puzzle: our puzzle which is otherwise complete. 

 

     What is the shape of that hole?  That hole is shaped like God. 

 

     We yearn backwards, seeking to fill that hole and to make our souls complete. 

 

     Only one specific, single puzzle piece can fill that hole. 

 

     Have we dropped it on the floor somewhere? 

 

     Was the piece not supplied in the puzzle box to begin with? 

 

     No.  It was there in the box. 

 

     It still is. 

 

 

IV

 

 

     Once, when we were born, we had that piece before.  Once, then, it was properly in its place, before the circumstances of our lives on earth and our doubts and our fears dislodged it.  Once before, you see, we were complete. 

 

     And we may be complete again.   

 

     However, unwisely, some of us shun to touch that piece and to press it back into its proper place, that piece that is shaped like God. 

 

     So those ones, they hurt, not being complete…and they always will. 

 

     Others, though, we take up that piece—despite the distracting circumstances of our lives and our doubts and our fears—and we press that piece back in. 

 

     Ah!

 

*****

Reach me, if you like at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com