Odile's Memories

The phone rang and a voice said:  “I teach in the college of architecture and I want to learn French.  May I sit in your class?”  Of course, I answered.  And this was the beginning of the richest twenty-five years of my life.  Gary liked French and learned quickly, but he liked the teacher even better.  We both enjoyed movies, theater, literature, art, independent traveling though he certainly beat me when it came to talking.  How he loved to tell a story!  I don’t know if the stories did it for me, but this spirited Irishman who had done so many things in his life soon bewitched me.   

 

A blissful sabbatical took us to France, Morocco, Egypt, Italy and Greece.  We biked around the transparent lake of Annecy, gaped at the colossal Egyptian temples as we cruised the Nile, walked in the Italian countryside in search of sleepy villages, sat on a balcony in Greece and drank ouzo while watching boatmen struggle to dock their boats.  Finally we returned home, and a routine mammogram found a tumor in my breast.  To soften my distress, Gary pulled a walking stick out of a closet and said:  “See how smooth it is here?  That’s because I leaned on it.  I am your stick.”  We beat breast cancer together, and from then on, he was my stick and my compass, my loving and at times infuriating companion, one who believed in me more than I believed in myself.

 

Travels led to more travels.  Europe often, Canada, Mexico, South America, Egypt, Vietnam…  Oh! The places we did go.  Coming home, it was story time.  Trust it to Gary to embellish the narrative and to imitate all sorts of accents as he went along, especially the Irish brogue!  Even now, I believe he would rather be remembered for his story telling than anything else.

 

But the journey always called him back and made the packing and the leaving worthwhile:  the endless discoveries, the interactions with engaging people, the awareness that each pause held treasures to be found and recreated.  He saw and understood the unique, the overlooked, the quirky, the exquisite and the grotesque.  And he learned from me that you don’t have to keep moving all the time, that renting a place in a beautiful land can be as rewarding as being on the road.  He learned to “savor and wallow.”  To say that I miss him is a painful understatement.  I lost my walking stick and my compass, and I don’t know where I am going.  Yet sometimes, deep inside the pain, I see how lucky I was to share twenty-five years with my best friend and beloved husband, my dear Gary.