I am still a selfish friend, sitting in wonder on the train ride back, awed at the paper spring I'd just spent two solid hours folding.
There are a few friends I cherish most dearly, because they teach me so much.
I cherish them for their greatness, their kindness, their hearts of reinforced steel lined with handspun silk, their bright azure spirits.
And also, because I learn from them. Take, take, take... sigh
Pierre is one of the greatest among them, the inner core of strength shining so strongly, whether he is lounged in a chair folding something geometrically awesome, mixing a frenchisized tabouli which I'm going to try tonight before I forget how, standing at a blackboard attempting to dumb-down his thesis so that I can grasp how this or that tree or logic supposition works, or speed-walking his way through the wiry trees and calcium-deposits towards the callanques of Marseilles.
Wild rosemary grows in these mountainsides, in Antibes it was thyme.
Things I learned this weekend:
- how to make a tabouli
- how to draw a permanent "Elbereth" on the ground in nethack so that it doesn't disappear after a few rounds
- how to do a clever balloon trick which I will repeat as soon as I manage to blow up the balloon without the handy toy that Norman taught me to use
- how to understand the diagram of the complex Kawasaki rose (the easy one I've known by heart since we did those gazillion bouquets in Lyon)
- how to fold the "ressort" that I used to do way back in Lyon
- a neat trick with potato starch that David's girls are going to LOVE playing with
- how to make magic origami boxes that can keep you occupied for an extended chunk of time trying to figure out
- how to listen to experimental Jazz, or at least we listened to enough of it that I started to get that feel...
And about a billion other things, the ultra-flammable magic string, how to do this or that fold, how to giggle uncontrollably at the words "zut alors", that the sign "CHUTE DE PIERRES" doesn't mean that it's going ot be raining Pierres at the castle... The true meaning of "indispensable".
...And we saw the Notre Dame de Garde and I remembered the story of the plague that someone had told me and how they'd built the church to drive it away, and we clambered among rocks in wind so strong that tying my shock of curls into a scarf only endangered the scarf.
Sitting at a desk in the computer lab yesterday, while Pierre photocopied various origami sheets from my book, and some of his for me, sitting at a Linux terminal, the world smelled the same as four years ago in University in Lyon.
Damp and cold and french-scented dust, papers with greek ciphers scattered everywhere, very much not at random.
Heart brimming, I e-mailed my slut, realizing once again that I was doing something I'd always wished for.
Having someone worth writing to whilst I was locked up in a computer lab in University.
TOwards the end at Concordia, I had Steven to write to.
Yesterday, I had David...
...and I will never complain that my heart and my life are not full.
On the train ride there I tried folding the lion - only 48 folds if you don't count the initial 18 for the basic form and all the "repeat other side" ones, and I made it to the forty-first fold before crumpling it into the waste bin.
On the way back the young man across from me gazed with something akin to wonder as I carefully creased the seventy-wo squares of the spring down their diagonals, and then began assembling it.
When I finished it, and tested it, and stopped swearing long enough to giggle maniacally, the train screeched to a stop in the middle of the rails.
There was an errant horse on the tracks and we had to wait a half hour before they found it, returned it to the pr�s, and let us continue pas Avignon on the way to Paris.
Catching the last m�tro home I played with my ressort, avoided the glances of strange men in too-fashionable clothing, and though of Pierre's silhouette flapping in the winds, outlined against the "Candelle de Luminy" and the impossible turquoise of the ocean.
In thirty-four hours, ten of which we spent heavily asleep, I learned so many things.
And laughed, and babbled, and played with the neighbour's cat on the spanish-style terrasse of his appartment, covered with a hundred plants and a hundred more memories.
Michel Portal is playing on the CD he burned for me, and I am preparing for the session technique tonight, Limoges tomorrow, and for Princess' arrival next week.
ANd once again, evertying is so full...
Marseilles is a big, dirty town, with Montreal-style punkass kids lingering at the fountains, and the salt-stained boats I remembered from my first visit there five years ago.
This time, it was just another collection of streets and caf�s and bars and promenades, the old port like Montreal, the pedestrain street like Prince-Arthur, the stores like Paris, the mountains like Antibes, the University like Lyon, and Pierre, like nowhere else.
On Saturday it was cold and dark and wet and I experienced the greyness of an artsy french movie set in Marseille, and yesterday it was brighter than a Jamaican beachfront, the wind tearing at my cheeks, the rockes shifting beneath my feet and shining against my glasses, refracting into a thousand visions and dreams in the bubbles of hot air above the rise and fall of the ocean.