All fun & games until someone gets hurt.

“Baby, you can’t stop the rain” – yes, I do listen to Cher, even while painting.  Hey, we’re only as sick as our secrets.  It’s a Wednesday or Thursday in the last week of May, raining almost everyday since I returned from Italy, no end in sight – and I love it!  It rained all last night again with me as audience, sleeping in to hear it continue this morning.  Now I’m watching the rain from my breakfast table as I drink my second American-sized morning coffee.  My routine has become that I do whatever I want in the morning – read, go for a walk (in the mud), make my music playlist for the afternoon – and paint about 4 hours in the afternoon (always finishing in time for a shower and dinner before Plus Belle la Vie!).  So this morning, staring out at the rain, my coffees finished, I begin to read.  It feels foreign.  Putting the book down, I stare out at my framed little world and the rain trying to make up its mind – sometimes a light drizzle, then suddenly a heavy pour.  I love the rain, especially when I’m not needing to go out.  It slows me down, makes me pay attention to nature, and rearranges my priorities: grocery shopping’s no good when the bags come home wet, laundry won’t dry so why bother…  Rain encourages, sanctions actually, procrastination.  So watching the rain lift a bit brings me down.  But then another crescendo of downpour lifts my spirits again.  I wonder how the clouds do this:  a sprinkle instantly followed by a river from the sky.  My friend Tim, the cloud expert, could probably tell me.  And the sound of the rain isn’t a constant beat, but unpredictable, which quiets my thinking (except regarding the science of clouds) and feels like a meditation.   A little bird has now joined the concert – soprano, I think.  How fun to be lulled by the rain – although two nights ago the thunder boomed overhead almost all night.  I finally got up in the dark, only to suddenly be walking on glass shards.  The mirror installed in the bathroom had been shaken off the wall by the thunder!  Good riddance – don’t need it anyway…

Now it’s Wednesday.  I know this because it’s three days after Sunday, the day I learned Michel had died.  He was a good friend, a close friend.  Almost a boyfriend.  He lived up on the hills behind my old apartment in Mandelieu – the hills I look at now outside my window.  He was my ride to church every Thursday evening for the group study there.  He only spoke French, but always spoke to me with his big smile as if I understood him.  His construction company justified the big green truck he drove (probably the only pick-up truck in Cannes), dog in back, and sometimes his 4-year-old daughter riding to church with us.  I remember his truck always smelled funny, like a bachelor, I suppose.  Instead of taking the main route to church, he drove through the little winding streets over the hills above Cannes with an explanation that he’d love to have a Porsche.   After a late day at work and being hungry (the French always provide food at a gathering, but they inevitably don’t start until close to 8pm), I easily got car-sick.  I did try, once, to ask him if he could take the direct route, not over the mountains.  I can’t imagine what convoluted meaning came out of that request, but his response was simply “Parlez Francais, Laurie!  Parlez Francais!” as we headed up into the mountains.

I often saw his truck in Cannes – especially nice when I was waiting for the bus home – or would bump into him in the street.  It seemed I saw him accidentally more than anyone else.  One rainy evening as I was talking to a real estate agent about an available storefront for lease near the train station (I wanted to open up a gallery and art workshop space at one point), Michel happened to walk by.  He spoke with the agent a while, then over coffee explained how the commercial leasing worked.  A few months before my departure from France, we happened to meet downtown.  He’d been going to a different church for about a year, so we stopped and had a coffee.  He was amazed at my French!  I could speak French, now!  And now I was leaving…?  We stayed in touch those last few months, never quite dating, but almost.  He and his daughter came to my good-bye party, and I thought of staying.  But the movers were on their way to Mandelieu, and I had commitments in the States.

So looking up at the hills where he lived, I thought that I must call him when I get my cell phone.  I’d lost his number but emailed a mutual friend to get it.  She wanted to wait to see me before telling me the news.  He’d died, only four months after I’d left.  Murdered, actually.  Pushed off a balcony.  I think this is what grieves me the most.  An illness, car accident, something that happens in life; but murder doesn’t happen in my little white suburbia world.  He’d taken a job to remodel a restaurant in, of all places, Morocco.  He was going to walk away from it over a money squabble, which I could see him doing.  He ended up not going anywhere.

It’s been harder and harder to do my painting.  I cry a lot.  I think of people who tell me that artists do their best work under difficult circumstances.  My work is a mess.  But I’ll let it be a mess until something good comes out of it.  Oh, and the rain has finally stopped.