When I first encountered Jimmy Rosenberg, he was a child.
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Not simply a child who played the guitar well, but one of those bewildering prodigies who make ordinary ideas about learning seem inadequate. He began playing at seven. At nine he was leading the Gypsy Kids. At twelve he had made an album. Before long he was traveling internationally, playing festivals and eventually Carnegie Hall, admired by musicians whose names belonged to an entirely different world from the Sinti community in which he had grown up.

Everyone wanted to hear Jimmy.

Apparently, some people even wanted a piece of his T-shirt.

There is a moment in the story of the young Jimmy when admirers begin tearing pieces from his shirt as souvenirs. What stays with me is not the fame of the scene but Jimmy’s reaction to it. He seems bewildered. Why would anybody want a piece of his shirt?
Years later, after the crowds had largely disappeared, he made another remark that has stayed with me.

When you aren’t famous anymore, nobody likes you.
I keep putting those two moments together.

I don’t want to put words into Jimmy’s mouth or explain feelings that belong to him alone. But I find myself listening to the child still audible in the grown man’s observation.

What did all those people want from him?

And what happens to a child when everyone wants something he possesses before he is old enough to understand what possessing it means?

The boy everyone wanted

Jimmy’s first success came almost before he was old enough to choose it. He was the extraordinary child everyone wanted to hear.

His talent carried him rapidly beyond the world of childhood. Hotels, airplanes, festivals, recordings and adult musicians became ordinary parts of his life. James Brown and Stevie Wonder admired him. Michael Jackson reportedly did too—an intriguing detail, although we cannot know what Jackson knew of Jimmy’s circumstances or what drew him to his playing. Perhaps it was simply one extraordinary musician recognizing another.

But it is difficult not to notice the echo: another phenomenally gifted boy whose talent became a public possession long before he could determine what place it should have in his private life.

Jimmy’s story eventually became very dark.

Drugs entered it. So did fear, violence, illness, broken engagements and broken relationships. His son died. There were overdoses, a suicide attempt and a brain hemorrhage. The young man who had seemed capable of doing anything with a guitar became increasingly incapable of managing the ordinary demands of living.

The documentary The Father, the Son & the Talent was so painful for me that at first I couldn’t finish watching it.

I thought I knew what story I was seeing.

A prodigy. Fame. Drugs. Collapse.

Poor little Jimmy.

But I had stopped reading too soon.

Jon and Jimmy

One of the people who knew Jimmy through some of the most difficult years was the Norwegian guitarist and producer Jon Larsen.

Larsen had already been deeply involved in this musical world before Jimmy entered his life. He had been the first producer of the Rosenberg Trio—Stochelo, Nous’che and Nonnie—and decades later still speaks warmly of that association.

But Jimmy became something different.
Larsen later described their long, turbulent relationship by saying that they had been like brothers.

“Like brothers” is important because this was no sentimental friendship.

At one point Jimmy’s behavior and threats became frightening enough that Larsen felt he had to protect himself and his family from him. Yet Larsen eventually set out toward Jimmy again. He searched for him. He tried to reconnect. He helped create another opportunity for him, arranging a tour.

Jimmy failed to show up.

That detail matters.

Love did not cure Jimmy. Friendship could not make him well. An opportunity could be placed before him, but nobody could make him capable of accepting it.

Community can sustain us. It can also place unbearable pressures upon us. And sometimes the people who love someone most must move away from him in order to protect themselves.
Then, sometimes, they try again.

There is something painfully familiar in that rhythm, and it isn’t peculiar to famous musicians or Sinti families.

Families everywhere know versions of it.

Love. Hope. Fear. Boundaries. Another chance. Disappointment. Sometimes another return.

From Jimmy’s side, people disappeared.

From the other side, some of those people had very good reasons to leave.
Both things can be true.

That is why I don’t want villains or saints in Jimmy’s story. And increasingly I don’t want to explain Jimmy.

I want to listen to him.

Nobody likes you when you’re not famous

Jimmy seems remarkably inclined to blame himself for what happened to him.

Perhaps he should not carry all that blame.

The boy in those early films does not look to me like a bad boy headed inevitably toward destruction. He looks like a sensitive, extraordinarily gifted child placed very early inside circumstances that would have challenged a far more mature person.

And through the later Jimmy, that child occasionally seems to speak.

The T-shirt.

The bewilderment at fame.

The terrible simplicity of nobody likes you when you’re not famous.

There is a question I hear underneath those moments, although Jimmy himself does not ask it:

Did they love me, or did they love what I could do?

Perhaps no one who has been a child prodigy ever completely escapes that question.
And perhaps that is why the people who remain—or return—matter so much.

Not because they can save you.
Because their presence can tell you that you still exist when you are no longer performing for them.

2020

And then, according to the account Jimmy and the people around him now give, something happened.

In 2020 Jimmy was asking himself whether he wanted to continue at all and whether music still had meaning for him.

He asked for a sign.

A car horn sounded.

At the door was Johan Peeters.

Jimmy took that as his answer.
There are many ways to understand such a moment. What matters to me is how Jimmy understood it.
He wanted to return.

That sentence is important.

Someone could appear at the door. Someone could offer help. Someone could manage concerts, make telephone calls, organize recordings or create opportunities.
But Jimmy had to want to return.

With Johan Peeters and David, he eventually helped create the Jimmy Rosenberg Academy. The organization speaks of teaching, masterclasses, recordings and performances. It speaks of healing and connection.

And it uses a phrase that startled me when I first encountered it:

“a second musical life of Jimmy Rosenberg.”

We had already begun calling it Phase Two.
Apparently Jimmy and those around him feel the division too.
Phase Two

Phase Two need not mean reclaiming what was lost.

I hope it doesn’t.

Jimmy does not have to become the miraculous boy again. He does not have to prove that every astonishing thing once said about his talent remains true. He doesn’t have to fulfill the promise other people saw in him when he was nine or twelve or twenty.
His first success came almost before he was old enough to choose it.

Phase Two can be different: success on his own terms, at an age when he can understand what the music means to him rather than simply carrying the burden of what his gift meant to everyone else.
Perhaps the music can finally belong to Jimmy instead of Jimmy belonging to the music.
And there is another kind of return taking place quietly around the edges. Family appears again. Brothers, a sister, grandchildren. Some contact may be limited; some relationships undoubtedly carry histories we know nothing about and have no right to simplify.

But Jimmy once spoke of how desperately important it was to him to be able to see his grandchildren.

So these connections matter.

The spectacular return is the guitarist walking onto a stage.

The harder return may simply be a man finding his way back to people.

Spacious time

All of this has unexpectedly made me think again about Django Reinhardt.

Near the end of Django’s life, after he and Naguine settled at Samois-sur-Seine, Naguine noticed a change in him. The restless Django who had spent so much of his life moving—between cafés, musicians, cities, cars, trains, danger, escape and applause—had become something else.

She said he had become a poet.

He had time to notice the world around him. He could remain beside the Seine until three in the morning, listening to the water and the trees—to what Django himself called the “true music.”

Django had found spacious time.

Not merely hours with nothing scheduled in them. Something much rarer: time in which attention itself could expand.

He did not have to perform.

He could listen.
And perhaps that is another way of thinking about what I wish for Jimmy Rosenberg in Phase Two.

Not another Carnegie Hall.

Not another crowd trying to take pieces of his shirt.

Not even another demonstration that Jimmy Rosenberg remains one of the great guitar talents of his generation.
I wish him spacious time.

Time to be with brothers and sisters and grandchildren. Time to play when playing gives him pleasure. Time not to play. Time to discover what music sounds like when nobody is demanding anything from it.

Time, perhaps, to hear the water and the trees.
Jimmy Rosenberg was born in 1980. I suddenly realized that he is the age of my daughter.
That changed something for me.

He is not an old man whose life can be summed up.
He still has time.

Perhaps success now means playing because he wants to play. Finding pleasure in music again. Being surrounded by people who value Jimmy when Jimmy is not performing. Discovering that he does not have to earn belonging by being extraordinary.
Because underneath everything—the fame, the drugs, the missed concerts, the frightening episodes, the broken relationships and the dazzling guitar playing—I still remember the little boy wondering why strangers wanted pieces of his T-shirt.

And I hear the grown man saying that nobody likes you when you’re not famous.

Perhaps Phase Two can give him another answer.

Some people stayed. Some had to leave. Some found their way back. Others may yet do so. New listeners are discovering him. Old listeners are listening again.

And Jimmy is still here.

Still playing.

Still becoming.

The child prodigy had very little choice about becoming Jimmy Rosenberg.

The man may finally have the time—and the space—to decide what being Jimmy Rosenberg means.

Click here for an fairly recent interview with Jimmy:
Jimmy interview

In the third part of the film Jon & Jimmy, Stochelo Rosenberg recalls that opportunities came to him when he was thirteen or fifteen. His father told him no: he must take his time and choose. Stochelo had a life before beginning his career, finally making that choice at about eighteen. Jimmy’s path was very different. His astonishing gift carried him forward before he could possibly have understood all that would be asked of him.

Near the end of the film, Jon Larsen remembers how Django overcame what might have ended another musician’s life, and expresses the hope that Jimmy, too, will find his way back to music. Jimmy’s answer is simple: if you really want something, you will make it happen.

Years later, that possibility remains. The recent interview does not show a man without hope. It shows someone who knows the value of his gift and wants the freedom to decide how it will be used. Fingers crossed—not for Jimmy to return to the life others once designed for him, but to the music and the future he chooses for himself.
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The hope and the music live on.

When Django Reinhardt died in 1953, the music did not die with him. But for a time, its future may not have been easy to see.

The original Quintette du Hot Club de France belonged to another era. The clubs changed, jazz changed, and the postwar musical world moved rapidly toward bebop and beyond. Django himself had already moved with it. His final recordings show a musician reaching forward, not looking back.
Others carried parts of his world with them.

Joseph—Nin Nin—continued to play after the brother who had so often occupied the center was gone. 

Stéphane Grappelli, who outlived Django by more than four decades, became perhaps the most visible living bridge between the original Quintette and the generations that followed. He continued to tour and record, playing with Biréli Lagrène and actively championing the young Rosenberg Trio. After hearing Stochelo, Nous’che and Nonnie, he invited them to perform with him, took them before international audiences and later recorded with them. They even joined him at Carnegie Hall for his eighty-fifth birthday celebration. By sharing the stage with these younger musicians, Grappelli gave them more than his approval. He allowed the original music to become a conversation between generations.

Eugène Vées remained connected to Django’s family and to the musicians who had surrounded him. Django’s sons, Lousson and Babik, each faced the difficult inheritance of carrying his name while trying to discover what music might belong to them.

Continuity did not mean standing still.

In 1968, fifteen years after Django’s death, musicians and friends gathered on the Île du Berceau at Samois-sur-Seine for a public tribute. It was not yet the great international festival it would become. It was closer to an evening among people who remembered him.

But the gathering continued. Over time, Samois became a place of return. Musicians came from across France and eventually from around the world. Families met again. Children listened to fathers, uncles and older cousins. Young guitarists arrived carrying phrases they had learned from Django’s records and left having heard what other musicians were making of them.

The village where Django had found spacious time became the place where the music began another life.
Michael Dregni calls this later chapter in the story “Resurrection.” The word is appropriate, provided we do not imagine the music rising again unchanged.

Biréli Lagrène, born in 1966 into a Sinti family in Alsace, learned Django’s music so thoroughly that as a boy he could reproduce entire solos. His early brilliance made him seem almost like Django returned in the body of a child. But Biréli did not remain there. He moved into bebop, fusion and other forms of jazz, playing with musicians far beyond the Manouche world before returning repeatedly to the music from which he had begun.

That movement seems essential.

Begin with Django
.
Then become yourself.

Stochelo Rosenberg brought another kind of elegance. Playing with his cousins Nous’che and Nonnie in the Rosenberg Trio, he emerged from the closely woven musical life of a Dutch Sinti family. His playing could be dazzling, yet it rarely seemed interested in display for its own sake. There was precision, grace and an almost impossible calm.
The family photographs surrounding Stochelo tell part of the story. The music does not stand apart from marriages, mothers, cousins, children and communal life. It grows inside them. A musician may step forward as a soloist, but behind him is an entire world that taught him how to listen.
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Angelo Debarre carries the music differently again—fierce, alert, rhythmically alive. In Les Fils du Vent, he appears not only as a musician but as a thoughtful man examining the political and social conditions surrounding his community. Then we see him with his son. Angelo plays a phrase; the boy repeats it. There is no lecture and no written exercise. The knowledge passes directly from one person to another: eye, ear, hand, memory.

At the Chope des Puces, another form of continuity took place. Mondine Garcia played there for decades, joined first by his son Ninine and later by younger members of the family. Ninine began as an accompanist and developed into a soloist with a lyrical voice of his own. The little room near the Saint-Ouen flea market became another kind of school—not an institution, but a place where generations played beside one another and where anyone who entered could hear the tradition being renewed in real time.

The Schmitt family carried it onward as well. Dorado played guitar and violin; his sons Samson, Amati and Bronson grew into the music around him. To see them together is to understand that inheritance does not produce identical musicians. Each receives the family language, but each speaks with a different voice.

And the circle did not remain within Manouche or Sinti families. Joscho Stephan, born in Germany outside that community, absorbed Django’s music with such devotion and technical brilliance that he too became part of its continuing story. Musicians across Europe, the United States and far beyond discovered the distinctive rhythm, freedom and intimacy of the music and began answering it in their own ways.

The festivals multiplied. What began at Samois inspired gatherings elsewhere, and the music traveled across Europe, the United States and far beyond. A musical language born from Django’s encounter with American jazz crossed borders repeatedly, returning in each new place not as a museum piece, but as an invitation.

That may be the most remarkable part of Django’s legacy.

He created something so unmistakably his own that nobody else could reproduce it—and something so open that thousands of musicians could enter it.

The children watched.

They listened.

They repeated the phrases.

And then, if the tradition remained alive, they changed them.

The circle widened through countries, generations and families. It included musicians who had known Django, children who knew him only through their parents, and others who encountered him through recordings made before they were born. Some carried his acoustic swing. Others took the music into bebop, fusion or entirely new settings. What joined them was not imitation but recognition: each had heard something in Django that gave him permission to become more fully himself.

Among the children who received that permission was another Rosenberg—a little boy named Jimmy.
His gift was so extraordinary that the world noticed almost immediately. But being welcomed into the circle and being prepared for everything the world would demand from him were not the same thing.

Jimmy’s story would reveal both the strength of this inheritance and the terrible weight it could place upon a child.

But Jimmy’s story is not over.
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Neither is the music.

Click link  to continue to the next chapter: Jimmy Rosenberg: Phase Two

The illustrated history of Gypsy jazz makes clear how widely Django’s influence spread and how many remarkable musicians followed him. But this is not meant to be a complete history of that legacy. The musicians who matter here are those whose music and lives brought Django’s world closer to me.

I never managed to attend the Django Reinhardt Festival at Samois-sur-Seine, although for years I longed to be there. Jean-François Robinet helped close that distance. For the festival’s fiftieth anniversary, he produced a richly illustrated book filled not only with photographs, but with personal knowledge of the people who had participated over the years. Jean-François was very sweet to me. Through his generosity, the festival ceased to be merely an event I had missed. He allowed me to enter it through the eyes and memories of someone who had truly been part of it.

The films brought me closer still. In them, Samois is not simply the place where Django spent his final years or where a festival bears his name. It becomes a place of return: musicians gathering, families meeting again, children watching their fathers and uncles play. One film shows Angelo Debarre teaching his son without explanation. Angelo plays a phrase, and the boy repeats it. The lesson passes from ear to hand, almost as naturally as speech.

Through these films I also came to know something of Django’s own family. Joseph Reinhardt—Nin Nin—appears not merely as Django’s brother and fellow guitarist, but as a musician with his own presence. Babik, Django’s son, carries a more complicated inheritance: the name, the expectations and his own desire to find a musical voice. Eugène Vées, speaking among people who had known Django, brings him back not as a monument but as a man. When asked what Django most loved to do, he answers: fishing—and billiards. When Joseph and Babik are asked whether Django would have called his music Gypsy jazz or jazz, Joseph answers without hesitation: jazz.

Those small moments matter to me. They return Django to his family and community while also preserving the independence with which he understood his art.

Then there are the musicians through whom I have continued to hear him: Biréli Lagrène, Angelo Debarre, Stochelo Rosenberg and the Rosenberg family, Dorado Schmitt and his sons, and Jimmy Rosenberg, whose astonishing gift came with burdens no child should have been expected to carry. They are not names on a historical list. I have watched them, listened to them, read about their families, recognized their faces and, gradually, cared about what happened to them. Their lives have helped me understand that this tradition is sustained not by imitation, but by each musician receiving something and making it his own.

Sometimes that world came very close indeed. A few years ago, I flew home from Puerto Vallarta expressly to attend a performance by the Django Festival Allstars presented by SFJAZZ in San Francisco. I had a perfect seat near the stage and afterward was able to meet and talk with the musicians. Pierre Blanchard on violin was a wonder, as was the accordionist and composer Ludovic Beier. And there was Dorado’s young son Amati, already carrying the music forward with astonishing assurance. The entire performance was spectacular.

This was not a legacy preserved behind glass. It was alive before me—familial, joyous and still evolving.
Biréli has remained more elusive. Three times I made plans to go to Paris to hear him, purchasing tickets and arranging my travel, only to have Covid intervene. I have not given up. Time waits for no one, and so I continue to watch for every opportunity to be present when this music is played.

Paris, of course, had already given me another way into this history. Many years after Django’s nights in Saint-Germain-des-Prés had passed into legend, I found my own way into a small Paris jazz room. At the Bilboquet I listened to Ahmet Gülbay and his trio, returning often enough that Ahmet became more than a musician I had gone to hear.

I wish now that I had taken photographs of those evenings. But I have the album Live at the Bilboquet, recorded with Christophe Le Van on bass and Philippe Le Van on drums. It contains the pieces they were playing in those days. The cover gives me glimpses of the musicians and the room, but when I play the recording, the still image opens. Ahmet sits down at the piano, the musicians gather around him, and I am there again.

By then Django’s Saint-Germain had become history. Yet something of its life remained: music moving through a crowded room, musicians answering one another, and a listener crossing the nearly invisible boundary between audience and belonging.
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Perhaps that is what Django’s legacy has come to mean to me. It lives not only in recordings or in the brilliance of the guitarists who followed him, but in families, friendships, remembered rooms and acts of generosity. Jean-François brought me closer to the festival I could not attend. Films allowed me to sit among Django’s family and friends. Musicians I might never meet became familiar presences in my life. And in a small room in Paris—and later, close to the stage at an SFJAZZ performance in San Francisco—I experienced something of that world for myself.
This is not the complete history of Django Reinhardt’s legacy.

It is the story of how his world became part of mine.

​Click link to go to the next chapter:  And the Circle Grows

After the war, the French jazz world divided against itself.
The argument centered on bebop, the fast, harmonically daring music arriving from America through Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the young musicians gathering around them. To Charles Delaunay, bebop was the next bold development in jazz. Hugues Panassié, his former colleague at the Hot Club de France, insisted that it was not jazz at all.

Their disagreement became bitter. Musicians, critics and followers were expected to choose a side: the older jazz that had grown from Louis Armstrong and the swing era, or this strange new music that seemed to move at the speed of the postwar world.

Django had never cared for other people’s definitions. Now the men who had helped create the Hot Club de France were quarrelling over what jazz was permitted to become. He rejected not only the argument but, for a time, the world conducting it.

He put aside his guitar and turned increasingly to painting.

(A photograph from Nice catches Mezz Mezzrow, Django, Louis Armstrong, and Stéphane Grappelli laughing together over drinks—a small reminder that, even as critics divided jazz into opposing camps, the musicians themselves continued to meet in the music.)

(Mezz Mezzrow, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, and Stéphane Grappelli at the first International Jazz Festival, Nice, February 1948. Photographer unknown.)

Painting had long interested Django. Like his music, it offered him a means of expression that did not depend upon written language. He painted landscapes, people, religious subjects and scenes from the world around him. The work was direct and intensely personal. Painting allowed him to observe quietly, away from audiences, managers and critics—and away from those continually trying to define what “Django Reinhardt” ought to be.

He did not cease playing altogether. He traveled, performed occasionally and made recordings in Rome. But he had withdrawn from the center of Parisian jazz life. The guitar that had once seemed inseparable from him could remain untouched.

Then a young alto saxophonist named Hubert Fol came looking for him.

Fol belonged to the new generation. He and his brother Raymond had immersed themselves in bebop and formed a group called the Be-Bop Minstrels. Hubert had listened closely to Charlie Parker and played with the speed, energy and new harmonic language that were transforming jazz.

He did not approach Django as a figure from the past. He heard in him a musician who could belong to the future.

Boris Vian understood this too. Vian was a writer, trumpeter, critic and one of the central spirits of postwar Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He moved easily among musicians, writers, intellectuals and the young people filling the neighborhood’s newly opened caves. In those cellars, jazz was not preserved behind glass. It was alive, crowded and unsettled.

Vian and Fol wanted Django to play at the Club Saint-Germain when it reopened after renovation in 1951. Django agreed—but on the condition that the club also exhibit his paintings.

They accepted.
This detail changes the meaning of his return. Fol and Vian did not ask Django to abandon painting and become “the guitarist” again. They welcomed the whole man: the painter he had become and the musician he might still become. While Django played the new music below, his paintings were displayed in the club.
The opposing sides of his life were permitted to meet.
Perhaps that was what Django needed. He cleaned his guitar and came back.

The old Quintette sound was not simply recreated. Grappelli’s violin and the acoustic rhythm guitars gave way to Hubert Fol’s alto saxophone, piano, bass and drums. Django played an amplified guitar and entered the rapid currents of bebop.

He did not imitate the young Americans. He listened to what they had discovered and absorbed it into his own musical language. The phrasing was still unmistakably Django, but the setting had changed. The music was leaner, stranger and more angular. At times it seemed as though the older master and the young saxophonist were urging each other forward.

The surviving recordings from the Club Saint-Germain preserve the excitement of that encounter. Alongside familiar pieces such as “Nuages” and “Manoir de mes rêves” are extended performances, announcements and even a spoken consideration of Django’s painting. The recording does not present a monument receiving ceremonial homage. It captures a working musician taking risks in a crowded Paris club.

That club stood at 13 rue Saint-Benoît.

Years later, when I began visiting Paris, it had become Le Bilboquet. I first entered Bilboquet to dine. From the restaurant above, I discovered the jazz below. After that evening I returned night after night, no longer for dinner but simply to listen.

It became my Parisian haunt.

During a month in Paris in the winter of 2004, my evenings developed their own rhythm. I would have dinner elsewhere and then walk through the freezing streets until it was time for the jazz sets. Wrapped in my long black wool coat, gloves and earmuffs, I apparently looked so thoroughly prepared for the cold that the elegant staff was amused when I arrived. Once seated on one of the low red velvet stools in the intimate club, I quickly became warm.

The pianist Ahmet Gulbay played there regularly with his trio. I returned for his music, his radiant smile and the community that formed around him. Visiting musicians dropped in. Strangers began conversations. One evening Ahmet invited an adolescent jazz pianist from the Berkeley High band to sit in—a gesture of generosity that the boy and his family surely never forgot.

I knew when I wrote about Ahmet that Django had once played at the Club Saint-Germain during his bebop years. What I did not yet know was the fuller story: that Hubert Fol and Boris Vian had drawn him back by making room for his painting as well as his music.

Nor had I fully considered the Hôtel Montana directly across rue Saint-Benoît, where Django and Naguine stayed. He could leave the hotel, cross the narrow street and descend into the club where his paintings and his new electric music awaited him.

The geography is almost impossibly intimate.

When I later returned to find Bilboquet closed forever, I wrote that a fire went out in my heart. I found Ahmet playing elsewhere, but the loss of the club changed Paris for me. It had not merely been a place where music was performed. It had become one of those rare rooms in which music gathers people into a temporary world.

It had done something similar for Django.

After the engagement at the Club Saint-Germain, Django and Naguine began moving away from hotel life. They lived for a time in a village south of Paris before finally settling in Samois-sur-Seine in the autumn of 1951. Django already knew Samois. He had fished there in earlier years and was drawn to the village, the river and the nearby forest.

At Samois he painted, played billiards and spent long hours fishing. He could sit by the Seine without needing to be the great Django Reinhardt. Naguine would later say that he was learning to become a new man.

But the new man had not left music behind.

From Samois, Django continued returning to Paris to play and record with Hubert Fol and other younger musicians. “Nuits de Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” “Flèche d’Or,” “Anouman” and the recordings made during the first months of 1953 reveal an artist still moving forward. His electric guitar did not have the familiar warmth of the old acoustic Quintette, but it possessed a different freedom. He was discovering how much space the new music offered him.

The apparent quiet of Samois and the energy of Saint-Germain were not opposites. He needed both: the river where he could fish and the cellar where he could test himself against young musicians; the solitude of painting and the immediate exchange of jazz.

During the months before his death, there was a new flurry of activity. He made some of the most modern recordings of his career, continued performing in Paris and had an important tour planned for October 1953.

The tour never happened.

In May, after returning from a Paris engagement, Django collapsed near his home in Samois. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died on May 16, 1953, at the age of forty-three.

His death is sometimes made to seem like the predictable end of a man who had withdrawn from the world. But that is not the Django we find in his final music. The recordings do not document a decline. They document an awakening interrupted.

At Saint-Germain, Hubert Fol had not rescued an old style. He had recognized an inexhaustibly curious musician. Django responded to the young man’s energy because he too was still curious—still capable of hearing an unfamiliar musical language and asking what he might say within it.

Years later, I sat in that same address listening to another generous musician invite a young Berkeley pianist to join him. I had gone to Bilboquet for the musicians of my own time, yet beneath them was an earlier evening: Hubert Fol, Boris Vian, Django’s paintings and an electric guitar newly cleaned.

The rooms had changed. The music had changed.

But one generation was still calling another into the circle

Click here to continue to next chapter:  The World That Reached Me

And this is what they heard at Club Saint Germain des Pres:
Nuits de Saint Germain des Pres
Anouman
Troublant Bolero
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There was a terrible contradiction at the center of Django Reinhardt’s life during the German occupation of France.

The Germans loved jazz. Or at least many German soldiers and officers loved it, whatever their government might say about “degenerate” music. And they loved Django. They crowded into the clubs where he played, requested his music, sought his company and treated him as a celebrity.

But Django was Manouche, and throughout occupied Europe Roma and Sinti were being registered, confined, deported and murdered by the same regime whose officers applauded him.
His fame offered him a measure of protection, but it could never make him safe. Nor could it separate him from the fate of his people.
When war began in September 1939, Django and the Quintette du Hot Club de France were touring England. Stéphane Grappelli chose to remain there. Django returned almost immediately to France.
It seems a reckless decision when viewed from the safety of another time. Yet Django’s life was in France. His mother, his brother, Naguine and the extended Manouche family to which he belonged were there. Returning to them may have been less a decision than an instinct. He could not imagine himself apart from his people.
In occupied Paris, he continued to play. With Hubert Rostaing’s clarinet replacing Grappelli’s violin, he formed a new quintet and became more popular than ever. His “Nuages,” recorded in 1940, seemed to express something the French could not openly say. Its melancholy carried both sorrow and hope, and audiences demanded to hear it again and again.

German officers heard it too.

Some of them genuinely admired Django’s music. Among them was Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, known in jazz circles as “Doktor Jazz.” He collected records, wrote about jazz and moved freely within the musical world of occupied France.

For years, it has been said that Schulz-Köhn intervened after Django was detained and saved him from arrest. That dramatic story may be true, but firm documentary evidence has proved difficult to find. What is certain is the disturbing relationship itself: a German officer could admire and perhaps assist one celebrated Manouche musician while serving the military power that was persecuting Roma and Sinti throughout Europe.
Django lived inside that contradiction.
The Germans wanted his music, but they wanted to control it. A proposed tour of Germany would have placed Django’s genius at the service of the Nazi cultural machine. He refused to go.

This was not the action of a conventional political hero. Django did not speak in manifestos, and he did not present himself as a member of the Resistance. His resistance was more personal and instinctive. He would play, but he would not allow the Germans to determine entirely what he played or where his music would take him.
Eventually, however, refusal was not enough.
In 1943, as the danger intensified, Django attempted to take his family across the border into Switzerland. By then Naguine was pregnant with Babik, who would be born in June 1944. What might otherwise sound like one of Django’s impulsive journeys becomes something very different when we remember her pregnancy. They were not merely fleeing for themselves. They were carrying the family’s future with them.
The women are essential to this story.
Django’s mother, Laurence Reinhardt—Négros to her family—had supported him from childhood. She had been a dancer and jewellery maker, a formidable woman who raised her sons within the independence and communal life of the Manouche world.

Naguine possessed a quieter but equally necessary strength. She had lived through Django’s absences, enthusiasms and unpredictability. During the war she faced something greater: the possibility that her husband’s fame would not be enough to save them. Pregnant and surrounded by uncertainty, she continued forward with him.
The women were not standing outside Django’s story, waiting for him to act. They were protecting the continuity of the family while the world around them threatened to destroy it.

The attempted escape failed. Swiss border guards refused Django entry and sent him back into occupied France. He and his family survived, but survival should not be mistaken for security—or for proof that the danger had been exaggerated. Django survived because of fame, luck, the assistance of others and perhaps because the machinery of persecution did not close around him quickly enough. Countless other Roma and Sinti were not so fortunate.

We cannot know entirely how Django absorbed what was happening to his people. He was not a man who explained himself readily. Much of what mattered most in him emerged through music rather than speech.

But in 1944 he began composing something unlike anything he had attempted before: a Mass for his people.

The film Django ends with a great performance of this sacred work as a requiem for murdered Roma and Sinti. It is a powerful scene, but the historical truth is quieter. Django never completed the Mass, and no such wartime performance is known to have taken place.

What survives is an approximately eight-minute fragment and a recording of Django speaking about it.

Because Django could not write musical notation, he dictated the composition to Gérard Lévêque, the clarinetist in his quintet, who put it onto paper. In 1944, pianist and organist Léo Chauliac played the fragment on the organ in the chapel of the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris. A radio interviewer was present.
Django was hearing his composition played on the organ for the first time.

When asked why he had written it, he explained that Roma throughout the world had used the masses of other peoples for centuries. He wanted to create a Mass of their own, to be performed by choir and organ.
The interviewer then mentioned that Django was sometimes called the king of the Gypsies. Django rejected the title, although with a characteristic glimmer of playfulness he allowed that perhaps it might happen someday. Then he said something much more revealing: he was greatly loved by his people, and he thanked them by offering them this Mass.
The work remained unfinished. Django admitted that he did not yet know its ending.
Perhaps an unfinished Mass is the most truthful memorial he could have left. It does not resolve what happened. It cannot account for the people who disappeared, or reconcile the Germans who applauded Django with the Germans who hunted Roma and Sinti. It cannot explain why Django and his family survived while so many others did not.
But the surviving fragment tells us something about where Django’s deepest loyalty lay.
The Germans may have wanted his music. Paris may have claimed him as its great jazz musician. The world would eventually celebrate him as the first European jazz genius.

Yet in that chapel, listening as an organ gave voice to music he had carried within himself, Django offered it to his people.
It belonged to them.

Click here to continue to next chapter:  A New Man St. Germain des Pres

And then there were the cars.

Not new luxury automobiles gleaming in a showroom. Django’s magnificent cars tended to have had magnificent lives before they reached him—once-grand machines, acquired secondhand, driven enthusiastically and often replaced with astonishing speed.

There were many of them.

Django never had a driver’s license.

This is usually where a biographer can begin making a case against him: irresponsible with money, indifferent to rules, unreliable, extravagant.

But I wonder whether we have been asking the wrong questions.

Django had grown up in a roulotte. Movement was part of the architecture of his life. He had wandered the streets of Paris as a boy and walked enormous distances as a young man. And he belonged to a people whose freedom to move was paradoxically subject to exceptional scrutiny by the country through which they moved. Papers. Registrations. Permissions. Places where one might remain for a while and places where one could not.

We should be careful not to turn every automobile into a political statement. Django may simply have loved cars.

I suspect he did.
But it is worth asking what a car meant to a man like Django Reinhardt.

Perhaps not what it meant to a prosperous Parisian who polished one carefully, kept it in a garage and calculated its resale value.
Django’s cars didn’t have to last forever.
They had to go.
And so did he.

The dandy

There was another transformation.

Look at him.

The boy from the roulotte had become one of the most distinctive figures in Parisian jazz, and Django dressed the part magnificently.

Beautiful suits. Hats worn with extraordinary assurance. Fine shoes. Jewelry. A cigarette held just so. Django could be elegant, theatrical, mischievous and completely self-possessed.

Again, it is tempting to read the clothes as evidence of sudden wealth.

But perhaps wealth isn’t quite the right word.

Years later, watching Les Fils du Vent, I was struck by something that complicated my own assumptions about Manouche life. Families might live in caravans, sometimes without the security of knowing how long they would be permitted to remain where they were, while women emerged beautifully dressed in labels one might expect to see in the wealthiest neighborhoods of Paris.

There was no contradiction for them simply because there was one for me.

A permanent house, a bank account, utilities, possessions accumulated and preserved—these are one culture’s measures of security and prosperity.

There are others.

Family. Music. Hospitality. Appearance. Pride. Mobility. Reputation. Belonging.

And freedom.

Django knew poverty. When money finally came, he seems to have had remarkably little interest in allowing it to tell him how a successful man was supposed to behave.

Money could buy a beautiful suit.

Wear it.

Money could buy dinner for everyone.

Eat.

Money could buy a wonderful old automobile.

Drive.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow would arrive soon enough.

There is something wonderfully Django about that, and something dangerous too. His independence could become unreliability. His pride could make him difficult. His freedom could bewilder or infuriate people whose livelihoods depended upon knowing whether Django Reinhardt was actually going to appear at the appointed hour.

We needn’t turn those things into virtues simply because we understand them better.

But neither do we need to call them “bad habits” and be finished with him.

The man was complicated. His life was complicated. And he made what he could of it according to his own rules and what mattered most to him.

His music.
His family.
His pride.
His freedom.

Perhaps freedom most of all.

For much of Django’s life, freedom seems to have meant being able to go.

To the next café. The next town. The next musician. The next automobile. Away from someone who wanted something from him. Toward something that interested him.

He had spent his life in motion.

Much later, in a village beside the Seine, something extraordinary would happen.

Django would discover that freedom could mean something else.

He could stay.

And, having stayed, he could listen.

But we aren’t at Samois yet.

For now, Django Reinhardt has money in his pocket, an immaculate suit on his back and another enormous secondhand automobile waiting outside.

Click here to go to next chapter: The Music They Wanted, the People They Hunted

I was going through my collection of photographs of Django Reinhardt when I came across this one.

I had saved it long ago, apparently without recording where I found it. I wasn’t even certain it was Django. But there was something about the photograph that made me stop. Five men sit around a little table on an outdoor terrace, guitars in hand, coffee cups and hats scattered among them. Beyond them are trees, sunlight and what looks unmistakably like the south of France.

Where was this? And was that really Django?

It turns out that I had stumbled back into one of my favorite stories about him.

The photograph was taken by Émile Savitry in Toulon, around 1930–31. Savitry himself is in the picture, along with Django, his brother Joseph—Nin-Nin—and two other musicians. And this casual little gathering occurred at an extraordinary moment in Django’s life.

Not long before, Django had emerged from the long ordeal that followed the fire in his caravan. His left hand had been terribly damaged, and during his convalescence he had essentially taught himself to play the guitar again, inventing a technique that accommodated the two injured fingers that would never regain their former movement.

Then he and Naguine set off for the south.

Michael Dregni, whose Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend has long been my guide to Django’s world, describes an almost unbelievable journey. Django and Naguine traveled on foot from Paris toward Nice—a trek of roughly a thousand kilometers. They slept in haystacks and survived however they could, Naguine sometimes earning money by reading palms and telling fortunes.

Eventually Django reached Toulon, where he found his brother Nin-Nin. The brothers began playing their guitars in cafés and along the waterfront, passing their hats for whatever people might give them.

And one evening Émile Savitry heard them.

Savitry was a painter, photographer, amateur guitarist and splendid bohemian who had recently returned from the Pacific. He was staying above the Café des Lions near the harbor when he heard the brothers playing. By the time he rushed downstairs to find the musicians, they had already moved on, so he went looking for them.

He found them.

That chance encounter became a friendship.

Savitry discovered that the brothers were nearly starving and began feeding them. When he had to leave Toulon briefly, he simply handed them the key to his apartment and told them to make themselves at home. When he returned, Django, Nin-Nin and Naguine had indeed made themselves at home. Instead of being annoyed, Savitry seems to have been delighted that he had not lost his musicians.

But perhaps the greatest gift he gave Django wasn’t food or shelter.

It was music.

Savitry had brought back records of the American jazz that was transforming music across the Atlantic. He played Django Duke Ellington, the violin and guitar of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, and Louis Armstrong.

Django had heard jazz before, but he had never heard anything quite like this.

Dregni tells of Django listening to Armstrong, putting his head in his hands and crying out in astonishment. Something had happened. He had heard a musical language that seemed to speak directly to him.

I love imagining that moment.

The Django in this photograph is not yet the Django whose name would become inseparable from Stéphane Grappelli and the Quintette du Hot Club de France. He is a young man who has survived a catastrophe, reinvented the way he plays his instrument, walked across France with the woman he loves, played for coins in cafés—and then happened to meet a generous stranger with a collection of records.

Looking at the photograph now, knowing all of that, it seems different to me.

Nothing announces that history is happening. Nobody is posing as a legend. They are simply sitting around a café table on the Côte d’Azur, guitars resting across their laps, drinking coffee and talking.

But somewhere around that table, a door has opened.

And Django is about to walk through it.

Click link to continue to next chapter:  The Freedom to Go

After the war, the French jazz world divided against itself.

The argument centered on bebop, the fast, harmonically daring music arriving from America through Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the young musicians gathering around them. To Charles Delaunay, bebop was the next bold development in jazz. Hugues Panassié, his former colleague at the Hot Club de France, insisted that it was not jazz at all.

Their disagreement became bitter. Musicians, critics and followers were expected to choose a side: the older jazz that had grown from Louis Armstrong and the swing era, or this strange new music that seemed to move at the speed of the postwar world.

Django had never cared for other people’s definitions. Now the men who had helped create the Hot Club de France were quarrelling over what jazz was permitted to become. He rejected not only the argument but, for a time, the world conducting it.

He put aside his guitar and turned increasingly to painting.

Painting had long interested Django. Like his music, it offered him a means of expression that did not depend upon written language. He painted landscapes, people, religious subjects and scenes from the world around him. The work was direct and intensely personal. Painting allowed him to observe quietly, away from audiences, managers and critics—and away from those continually trying to define what “Django Reinhardt” ought to be.
He did not cease playing altogether. He traveled, performed occasionally and made recordings in Rome. But he had withdrawn from the center of Parisian jazz life. The guitar that had once seemed inseparable from him could remain untouched.

Then a young alto saxophonist named Hubert Fol came looking for him.

Fol belonged to the new generation. He and his brother Raymond had immersed themselves in bebop and formed a group called the Be-Bop Minstrels. Hubert had listened closely to Charlie Parker and played with the speed, energy and new harmonic language that were transforming jazz.

He did not approach Django as a figure from the past. He heard in him a musician who could belong to the future.
Boris Vian understood this too. Vian was a writer, trumpeter, critic and one of the central spirits of postwar Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He moved easily among musicians, writers, intellectuals and the young people filling the neighborhood’s newly opened caves. In those cellars, jazz was not preserved behind glass. It was alive, crowded and unsettled.

Vian and Fol wanted Django to play at the Club Saint-Germain when it reopened after renovation in 1951. Django agreed—but on the condition that the club also exhibit his paintings.

They accepted.

This detail changes the meaning of his return. Fol and Vian did not ask Django to abandon painting and become “the guitarist” again. They welcomed the whole man: the painter he had become and the musician he might still become. While Django played the new music below, his paintings were displayed in the club.

The opposing sides of his life were permitted to meet.

Perhaps that was what Django needed. He cleaned his guitar and came back.

The old Quintette sound was not simply recreated. Grappelli’s violin and the acoustic rhythm guitars gave way to Hubert Fol’s alto saxophone, piano, bass and drums. Django played an amplified guitar and entered the rapid currents of bebop.

He did not imitate the young Americans. He listened to what they had discovered and absorbed it into his own musical language. The phrasing was still unmistakably Django, but the setting had changed. The music was leaner, stranger and more angular. At times it seemed as though the older master and the young saxophonist were urging each other forward.

The surviving recordings from the Club Saint-Germain preserve the excitement of that encounter. Alongside familiar pieces such as “Nuages” and “Manoir de mes rêves” are extended performances, announcements and even a spoken consideration of Django’s painting. The recording does not present a monument receiving ceremonial homage. It captures a working musician taking risks in a crowded Paris club.
That club stood at 13 rue Saint-Benoît.

Years later, when I began visiting Paris, it had become Le Bilboquet. I first entered Bilboquet to dine. From the restaurant above, I discovered the jazz below. After that evening I returned night after night, no longer for dinner but simply to listen.

It became my Parisian haunt.
During a month in Paris in the winter of 2004, my evenings developed their own rhythm. I would have dinner elsewhere and then walk through the freezing streets until it was time for the jazz sets. Wrapped in my long black wool coat, gloves and earmuffs, I apparently looked so thoroughly prepared for the cold that the elegant staff was amused when I arrived. Once seated on one of the low red velvet stools in the intimate club, I quickly became warm.

The pianist Ahmet Gulbay played there regularly with his trio. I returned for his music, his radiant smile and the community that formed around him. Visiting musicians dropped in. Strangers began conversations. One evening Ahmet invited an adolescent jazz pianist from the Berkeley High band to sit in—a gesture of generosity that the boy and his family surely never forgot.

I knew when I wrote about Ahmet that Django had once played at the Club Saint-Germain during his bebop years. What I did not yet know was the fuller story: that Hubert Fol and Boris Vian had drawn him back by making room for his painting as well as his music.

Nor had I fully considered the Hôtel Montana directly across rue Saint-Benoît, where Django and Naguine stayed. He could leave the hotel, cross the narrow street and descend into the club where his paintings and his new electric music awaited him.
The geography is almost impossibly intimate.

When I later returned to find Bilboquet closed forever, I wrote that a fire went out in my heart. I found Ahmet playing elsewhere, but the loss of the club changed Paris for me. It had not merely been a place where music was performed. It had become one of those rare rooms in which music gathers people into a temporary world.
It had done something similar for Django.

After the engagement at the Club Saint-Germain, Django and Naguine began moving away from hotel life. They lived for a time in a village south of Paris before finally settling in Samois-sur-Seine in the autumn of 1951. Django already knew Samois. He had fished there in earlier years and was drawn to the village, the river and the nearby forest.

At Samois he painted, played billiards and spent long hours fishing. He could sit by the Seine without needing to be the great Django Reinhardt. Naguine would later say that he was learning to become a new man.

But the new man had not left music behind.
From Samois, Django continued returning to Paris to play and record with Hubert Fol and other younger musicians. “Nuits de Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” “Flèche d’Or,” “Anouman” and the recordings made during the first months of 1953 reveal an artist still moving forward. His electric guitar did not have the familiar warmth of the old acoustic Quintette, but it possessed a different freedom. He was discovering how much space the new music offered him.

The apparent quiet of Samois and the energy of Saint-Germain were not opposites. He needed both: the river where he could fish and the cellar where he could test himself against young musicians; the solitude of painting and the immediate exchange of jazz.
During the months before his death, there was a new flurry of activity. He made some of the most modern recordings of his career, continued performing in Paris and had an important tour planned for October 1953.

The tour never happened.

In May, after returning from a Paris engagement, Django collapsed near his home in Samois. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died on May 16, 1953, at the age of forty-three.

His death is sometimes made to seem like the predictable end of a man who had withdrawn from the world. But that is not the Django we find in his final music. The recordings do not document a decline. They document an awakening interrupted.

At Saint-Germain, Hubert Fol had not rescued an old style. He had recognized an inexhaustibly curious musician. Django responded to the young man’s energy because he too was still curious—still capable of hearing an unfamiliar musical language and asking what he might say within it.

Years later, I sat in that same address listening to another generous musician invite a young Berkeley pianist to join him. I had gone to Bilboquet for the musicians of my own time, yet beneath them was an earlier evening: Hubert Fol, Boris Vian, Django’s paintings and an electric guitar newly cleaned.

The rooms had changed. The music had changed.

But one generation was still calling another into the circle.

As a child, I once asked my mother a question that puzzled me.

“When people look at me, do they see what I see when I look in the mirror?”

I don’t remember her answer. What I remember is the question. Somehow, even then, I sensed there was a difference between the person in the mirror and the person I experienced from within.

Today, we live surrounded by our own reflections.

We see ourselves in mirrors, photographs, video calls, security cameras, and social media. Never before have we been presented with so many opportunities to look at ourselves. Yet I sometimes wonder whether all this looking has brought us any closer to knowing who we are.

A recent newspaper essay suggested that constant exposure to our own image may actually distance us from ourselves. We become preoccupied with the person we present rather than the person we are. We begin to confuse the image with the life.

It reminded me of José Saramago and Fernando Pessoa, two writers who have quietly accompanied me for many years.

Pessoa understood that we are never only one person. Through his many literary voices, he explored the shifting, contradictory nature of identity. No mirror could contain that complexity.

Saramago, in his own way, questioned appearances just as deeply. Again and again, he asked whether we truly see reality or merely the images we create to replace it.

Their questions have stayed with me, but so has my own.

Is that really me?

The older I become, the more I think the answer is both yes and no.

A photograph records a face. A mirror reflects an instant. A video captures gestures and expressions. They are all real, but they are not the whole person.

The self we seek does not live in a reflection.

It reveals itself more quietly—in conversations that change us, in books that awaken us, in music that moves us, in cities we wander, in friendships that endure, and in those unexpected moments when something in the world suddenly feels familiar before we understand why.

Looking back over my own life, I realize I have discovered far more about myself by the gift of paying attention than by paying attention to my image.

Perhaps that is why curiosity has always mattered so much to me.

The gift of paying attention turns us outward. It asks us to listen before speaking, to observe before judging, to wonder before concluding. And somehow, by looking beyond ourselves, we begin to understand ourselves more deeply.

When I now see an old photograph and find myself wondering, Is that really me? I smile.

Don’t get too excited.

It isn’t.

The person I’m looking for has never lived in a mirror or a photograph.

She is still being discovered.

The you you seek is elsewhere.

Yesterday I watched two films recommended by my daughter.

She had discovered them on TAP while returning from a swimming adventure in the Azores and thought I would like them. I found them on Amazon Prime and bought them, as I generally do when I suspect a film might warrant a second viewing.

I had no idea they belonged together.

The first was a documentary about a young woman, an old boat, and two friends who set out across the North Atlantic for the Azores. Before the journey could even begin, they spent a year bringing the boat back to life. Then came thirty days at sea—beautiful, strenuous, sometimes frightening, and filled with the particular happiness that seems to come from choosing an adventure whose outcome you cannot entirely control.

The second film could hardly have seemed more different.

It was Brazilian, and at first I wondered whether it might be too dark for me. In the world of the film, the government has decided that citizens over seventy-five should be removed from ordinary life and sent to a compound where they will be cared for. The justification is chillingly practical: younger people should be freed from responsibility for the elderly so they can work and produce.

One woman isn’t having it.

What follows is another kind of adventure—a journey toward freedom through a world of water, extraordinary foliage, unexpected people, and lives being lived somewhere beyond the boundaries society has drawn for them.

Only after watching the two films back to back did I realize what my daughter had given me.

One story was about a young woman setting out into the unknown because she could.

The other was about an older woman setting out into the unknown because someone had told her she couldn’t.

And both found freedom on the water.

My daughter had just returned from swimming in the Azores. I was sitting at home watching the films she had discovered somewhere over the Atlantic.

Two women. Two boats. Two very different moments in life.

And somehow, for one afternoon, it felt like my daughter’s soul and mine were traveling together.

I wrote earlier about entering Dante through a side door—a film that led me toward a poem I had long hesitated to approach. I didn’t know then how far that door would open.

Recently I found myself thinking about something I had never quite put into words:

Time can become spacious rather than merely plentiful.

There is a difference.

Plentiful time can still be filled—with appointments, obligations, things to accomplish. Spacious time has room in it. Room to wander down a street simply because you haven’t walked there in years. Room to sit over a coffee. Room to read one canto of Dante and then spend an hour wondering about something you found there.
Perhaps that is what curiosity requires.
Not long ago, I watched Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante. It sent me to Nick Tosches’s novel, which in turn has sent me back to Dante’s Divine Comedy with an entirely different understanding of what I am reading.
The three have begun to speak to one another.

Tosches helps me see the man behind the Inferno: Dante in exile, his world disrupted, trying to make sense of disorder by imagining a universe in which everything has its place and its consequence. Schnabel takes Tosches’s unruly meditation on Dante and makes something different from it again. And then I return to Dante and notice things I might otherwise have passed by.

There is no particular destination in all this. I don’t need to finish the Divine Comedy by a certain date. I can read a canto, follow a reference, return to Tosches, watch Schnabel again, and see where the conversation takes me.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have done that at another time in my life. There were too many things that needed doing.

Now I have discovered the pleasure of spacious time.

It allows one thing to lead to another. A film to a novel. A novel to a seven-hundred-year-old poem. A morning walk to a house that unexpectedly brings back someone you knew long ago.

None of these connections needs to lead anywhere useful.

It is enough to notice them.

Curiosity needs spacious time.

And perhaps the invitation is simply this: when something catches your attention, don’t hurry past it.

See where it takes you

I have often wondered how one approaches Dante. Not simply how one reads him, but how one enters his world.

Surprisingly, I found my doorway not in a book, but in a film.

Recently I watched Julian Schnabel’s In The Hand of Dante. It is one of those rare films that demands a second viewing—not because it is confusing, but because it is so rich. Each time I watched, another layer revealed itself.

Only later did I discover that Schnabel’s film was itself based on Nick Tosches’s novel In the Hand of Dante. It seemed fitting. Even my path to Dante had taken a winding route.

Until then, I knew remarkably little about Dante himself. My interests had led me in neighboring directions. I had spent time reading about fourteenth-century Florence, the rise of the city-states, and later the Medici family. Like many people, I suppose I knew that Dante loved Beatrice. But beyond that, his political life, his exile, and the profound spiritual journey that gave birth to The Divine Comedy remained largely unknown to me.

Schnabel’s film invited me in through a side door.

Rather than presenting Dante as a distant literary monument, he brought him startlingly to life. The story moves effortlessly between medieval Italy and the modern world, with the same actors inhabiting both centuries. Past and present seem to echo one another until the boundaries begin to dissolve. The effect is mesmerizing. The passions, betrayals, ambitions, and longings of the thirteenth century suddenly feel very familiar. Human nature, it seems, has changed very little.

By the time the credits rolled, I knew I had to read Dante’s masterpiece for myself.

When the volume arrived, however, I confess I was startled. Ninety-nine cantos spread across more than nine hundred pages. I realized immediately that this was not a book to hurry through. It was an invitation to travel slowly.

So I made a quiet promise to myself: one canto each evening.

Even with the remarkable guidance of translators and commentators, The Divine Comedy asks for patience. Dante assumes his readers know the history, politics, philosophy, and theology of his age. More than once I have found myself stopping to look up a forgotten figure or untangle an ancient dispute before continuing on my way. Far from being frustrating, I have come to see this as part of the journey itself. Dante is not simply telling a story; he is inviting us to enter an entire world.

At the moment I am still making my way through Inferno. It is not easy reading, nor should it be. Dante asks us to look unflinchingly at pride, greed, betrayal, violence, and despair—not only in others, but in ourselves. Hell is a place where every soul has surrendered hope. That, perhaps more than the punishments themselves, is what makes it so haunting.

Yet everyone assures me that the climb grows brighter.

Beyond Hell lies Purgatory, where hope returns. Souls still struggle, but they struggle with purpose. They are moving toward something better. That promise alone has been enough to keep me turning the pages.

As I read, I realize that Dante’s great poem is about much more than the afterlife. It is about being human. We all wander into dark forests from time to time, uncertain of the path ahead. We all encounter fears that seem larger than ourselves. The difference is that, unlike the souls Dante leaves behind in Hell, we are free to keep walking.
Perhaps that is the enduring gift of The Divine Comedy. It reminds us that hope is not the certainty that everything will turn out as we wish. Hope is what allows us to take the next step before we know where the road will lead.

Sometimes all we need is a doorway.

Mine happened to be a film.

That doorway turned out to lead farther than I expected. After reading Nick Tosches’s novel and returning again to Dante, I began thinking about what makes these unexpected journeys possible. I continue that thought in Curiosity Needs Spacious Time.

​At about the same time I first encountered Hopper, I also discovered Fernando Pessoa. Soon afterward came Pirandello, de Chirico, and other writers and artists whose work seemed strangely familiar. I admired them deeply but could never quite explain why.

Looking back now, I think they were all speaking the same language.

Not a language of certainty.

A language of searching.

For years I believed I was collecting books, paintings, and music. I thought I was discovering artists.

Now I think something quite different was happening.

I was discovering companions.

When I first stood before Hopper’s Nighthawks, I was searching for answers I could not yet put into words. Pessoa was asking questions about identity. Pirandello wondered who we become when we imagine becoming someone else. Hopper painted ordinary people whose inner lives remained hidden. Each seemed to be circling the same mystery.

Yet none of them tried to explain it.

Hopper never explained the loneliness in Nighthawks. He simply painted it.

Pessoa never resolved his contradictions. He lived among them.

Pirandello questioned identity without pretending it could be neatly defined.

None of them offered answers.

Instead, they quietly said,

“I’ve wandered through this country too.”

At the time, I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear that.

The years passed. Life changed. I traveled. I walked the streets of Lisbon where Pessoa had walked. I sat in cafés. I listened to jazz in Puerto Vallarta. I discovered Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, Andrés Neuman, Dante, and many others. Along the way I was fortunate to meet my dear friend Darrel, who became the first flesh-and-blood companion in this growing conversation. Like the writers I admired, he never tried to tell me what to think. He simply shared the joy of paying attention.

Looking back, I can see that Hopper, Pessoa, Darrel, and the others did not lead me out of loneliness. They did something gentler than that.

They walked beside me until I found my own way.

Today, when I stand before Nighthawks or open a book by Pessoa, I no longer see only the questions that first drew
me to them. I also see the companions they became. They met me where I was and remained with me as I changed.

Perhaps that is the greatest gift art can offer.

Not instruction.

Not certainty.

Companionship.

We do not all ask the same questions, nor do we encounter them at the same moments in our lives. Yet every so often
a painting, a novel, a piece of music, or an unexpected conversation stays with us long after we have forgotten where
​we first found it. Something in it recognizes us before we fully recognize ourselves.

It offers no explanation and makes no promises.

It simply keeps us company until we are ready to continue on our own.

Sometimes that is enough.

Not because it answers our questions, but because it reminds us that we do not have to ask them alone.

When I began writing these essays, I thought I was sharing memories of books, music, travel, and art.

Now I think I was doing something else.

I was introducing the companions who quietly shaped the way I came to see the world.

Every so often I encounter a writer who changes not simply what I read, but how I read.

This spring I discovered the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes. I began with The Inquisitors’ Manual and then The Land at the End of the World. I finished both with the feeling that I had traveled somewhere entirely new—not to another country, but into another way of seeing the human mind.

At first, I wasn’t sure I knew how to read him.

The voices shifted without warning. Time folded back upon itself. Memories interrupted the present. One person’s thoughts merged into another’s until I sometimes wondered if I had lost my way.

But I hadn’t.

I simply had to learn a different kind of reading.

Most novels lead us by the hand from one event to the next. Lobo Antunes asks us to trust that meaning will emerge, not from chronology, but from consciousness itself. Gradually I realized that his novels are not difficult for the sake of being difficult. They unfold much as the mind itself unfolds. We do not remember our lives in neat chapters. A familiar smell recalls childhood. A single sentence returns us to a love long gone. Yesterday and forty years ago can occupy the same instant.

His writing feels astonishingly true to that experience.

People often point out that Lobo Antunes was both a psychiatrist and a military doctor during Portugal’s colonial war in Angola. Those experiences undoubtedly deepened his understanding of trauma and memory. Yet I don’t think they explain the extraordinary power of his novels.

Many psychiatrists have written books. Many soldiers have written about war.

Very few have possessed his remarkable ability to inhabit other minds without judging them.

That, to me, is his great gift.

His characters are neither heroes nor villains. They are simply human beings carrying memories, disappointments, loves, fears, regrets, and hopes. He asks us neither to condemn nor to excuse them, but to understand them. Reading him, I often felt that I was listening to people whose inner lives had finally been allowed to speak without interruption.

There is great compassion in that.

As I have continued reading Portuguese literature, I have come to appreciate how differently each writer approaches the mystery of being human. Fernando Pessoa revealed the many voices that can exist within a single self. José Saramago examined the stories societies tell themselves. Lobo Antunes enters the hidden chambers of memory itself, where those voices and stories are transformed into lived experience.

His novels require patience.

It is easy to become temporarily lost.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

Walking through the narrow streets of Lisbon, one quickly learns that not every turn leads directly to the destination. Sometimes the most memorable discoveries are found because we wandered a little longer than planned.

Reading Lobo Antunes feels much the same.

You don’t read him simply to find out what happens next.

You read him to discover how a human being remembers.

And somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, you begin to recognize your own mind in the echoes of another.

That is a rare achievement.

It is also why António Lobo Antunes has found a place in my Salon of Curiosity.

I was scrolling through Instagram this morning when a short advertisement stopped me in my tracks.

Not because I was interested in the product. Quite the opposite.

For a moment I felt as though José Saramago had quietly reached over my shoulder and whispered, “There it is.”

I have read The Cave several times, and each reading leaves me with the same admiration—not only for Saramago’s imagination but for his affection for ordinary Portuguese people. His potter, his family, his neighbors are industrious, stubborn, practical souls. They live by work, by patience, and by the old sayings that have accumulated through generations. Saramago scatters these popular proverbs throughout the novel as though they were another form of wisdom, polished smooth by countless hands.

It is hardly surprising.

Saramago was born in the tiny village of Azinhaga, the son of landless peasants. Even his name tells a story. His family name should have been simply José de Sousa, but a registrar, on his own initiative, added the village nickname Saramago—the name of a wild herb once gathered as food by poor families in difficult times. The mistake remained, and the humble plant became the name by which the world would know one of Portugal’s greatest writers.

Knowing this, one begins to understand the tenderness with which he portrays working people. He never romanticizes them, yet he sees their dignity. He knew their sayings because they were the sayings of his own childhood. He understood their perseverance because it was the perseverance of his own family.

In The Cave, that world is threatened by the immense commercial Center, where life gradually becomes detached from reality. Desire is manufactured. Success is displayed in shop windows. People begin chasing images instead of lives. Saramago once described our age as an audiovisual world, one in which reality is increasingly hidden beneath carefully constructed appearances.

The novel reaches its unforgettable climax when the family discovers, beneath the Center itself, a cavern containing figures chained before a wall, believing the shadows cast upon it to be the whole of reality. Saramago is, of course, echoing Plato’s famous allegory, but he gives it new urgency. The cave is no longer an ancient philosophical thought experiment. It is beneath the very place where modern society shops, consumes, and entertains itself.

That image has stayed with me for years.

Perhaps that is why a simple Instagram advertisement brought the novel flooding back. It was not the advertisement itself that mattered. It was the feeling that I was once again being invited to mistake appearance for reality, to pursue another carefully polished promise.

The great courage of Saramago’s characters is not that they destroy the Center. They simply refuse to remain inside it. They choose the uncertain freedom of real life over the comfortable illusion of shadows.

Saramago understood the cost of following one’s convictions. When The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was prevented by the Portuguese government from being considered for a major European literary prize, he left Portugal and settled on the island of Lanzarote. Yet he never ceased being profoundly Portuguese. His imagination, his language, and above all his affection for ordinary people remained rooted in the country that had formed him.

Years after his death, his ashes were returned to Lisbon and buried beneath a 109-year-old olive tree outside the Fundação José Saramago. The tree itself had been brought from Azinhaga, the village where his life began. I cannot imagine a more fitting resting place for a man who never forgot the earth, the people, and the quiet dignity from which he came.

That final image seems to answer the novel itself. In a world increasingly captivated by dazzling shadows, Saramago returned, at last, to something real: an ancient tree, simple soil, and the village that had first taught him how to see.
​

The excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey has sent many people back to Homer. They are rediscovering a story nearly three thousand years old and wondering how it has managed to survive for so long.

The answer may surprise us.
It survived because it was never simply a book.

Long before there were libraries, there were voices.

Homer, if indeed he was a single historical figure, was probably not a writer in the modern sense but a bard—a poet who composed and performed epic poetry before audiences. Most scholars believe the Odyssey took shape in the eighth century BCE, yet it preserved stories that had already been carried in human memory for generations.

The story belonged not to the page but to the people. Before it was ever written, it passed from one human voice to another, carried across the firelight into memory.

The listeners already knew something of the tale, just as we know the opening notes of a familiar melody. Yet each telling was new. The poems were not memorized word for word as an actor learns a script. They were composed in performance. Each telling might differ slightly, yet listeners always recognized the same familiar journey.

As I thought about Homer, I found myself remembering other voices.

The troubadours of France wandered from castle to castle carrying songs of love, adventure, and longing. Their verses traveled farther than they ever could alone.

Years later, living in Mexico, I discovered another tradition: the corridos. They were not relics of the distant past but living stories set to music. They celebrated heroes and outlaws, revolutions and romances, the ordinary and the extraordinary. News traveled on horseback, but memory traveled in song.

Different countries.
Different centuries.

The same human impulse.

We tell stories because they help us remember who we are.

There is something comforting in realizing that every age invents its own storytellers.
Homer had his lyre.

The troubadours carried a lute.

The corridistas traveled with guitars.

Django Reinhardt transformed six strings into stories no less compelling than words. One can listen to Nuages and feel an entire life unfolding without a single sentence being spoken. The melody wanders through light and shadow until, almost imperceptibly, it finds its way home. It is, in its own way, another Odyssey.

Before recordings, jazz standards lived in much the same way. Musicians knew the melody, but each performance became their own. No two versions were identical, yet everyone recognized the tune. Homer’s epics may have traveled through the ancient world in much the same fashion, reshaped by each gifted voice before they were finally committed to writing.

Perhaps that is why I have spent so much of my life following musicians. I thought I was listening to music. I was really listening to stories.

Fernando Pessoa understood something equally profound:

“Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.”

Odysseus returns to Ithaca carrying more than memories of distant islands. He returns as a different man from the one who set sail.

The notes have not changed.

We have.

Perhaps every great story is a journey home—not to the place we left, but to the self we have become

In 2024, during the last season I was able to spend with my dear friend and novelist Darrel in Puerto Vallarta, we often talked about writing. Darrel had fallen deeply in love with the characters in his second novel and spoke of them almost as living companions. His excitement made me wonder what it would feel like to write from inside another person’s life.

When I came home, I decided to try. A young man I had known only briefly many years before quietly stepped into my imagination. I didn’t invent him so much as listen to him. His voice arrived first, and I simply followed where it led.



Paul

Hey. My name is Paul. I live in a little town called El Cerrito, the little hill. Well, there is a little hill here and overall it’s a pretty nice place. 

I got a mom and a dad and a sister and we live in a little house with three bedrooms, one for me, one for my sister and a bigger one for my mom and dad. There is a bathroom we all share and, of course, a garage. The house is painted gray. I helped my dad paint it a couple of years ago and he paid me $20. The house is located up against the hill, so it is fun to ride our bikes up and cruise down. The go carts my friends and I build from odd pieces we find around town are really cool too. We are not quite in that fancier part of the hills. We are just normal folks. 

My mom is a seamstress and my dad, I don’t know what he does but someday I’ll find out. Mom‘s family is Spanish from Spain. She cooks a lot. She cooks wonderful things. We love her Paella. When she gets a little extra money she buys shrimp and all kinds of good seafood and makes us a really yummy dish from the country of her childhood. My sister is younger than I am so, yeah, I kinda get to call the shots around here especially when my dad is not home. Did I tell you my dad is Italian and pretty good looking. I guess that is what my mom liked about him.

I’m 14 by the way and run around with some guys that are pretty cool frankly and we smoke cigarettes and roll up the sleeves of our T-shirts and kinda look a little bit like James Dean. The girls at school like us—they think we’re cool and we do some kind of outlandish things from time to time, pushing the limits you know, see what we can get away with, see what this world is all about. Did I tell you I love music? I really love music. I love the blues, I love jazz guitar. I’m not real good at playing it, but I like to play. Sometimes me and my buddies get together and throw some music together in somebody’s garage or, I don’t know, basement room. But mostly we just kind of hang out. We go to school  and I’m a fairly decent student. I’m not real into it but yeah, I’m a fairly decent student and I think the teachers like me OK. 

I’m not sure if my dad likes me. He’s a little hard on all of us but mom is just a wonderful mom. You couldn’t invent a better mom. She’s very very cool. Her name is Helen.  Helen, like the light. My sister‘s name is Elena did I tell you? And Elena is also the light so I guess these two ladies are the light of my life. I can’t tell you my dad‘s name because I think I forgot it. 

Sometimes when my sister has her friends over I think they’re kind of cute but I’m a little bit shy about asking girls out and stuff. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to do. You know what I mean? I mean girls have such expectations and nobody told us guys what we are supposed to be coming up with so you go to the movies and see some stuff and maybe try to imitate someone like James Dean—he’s a pretty good one to imitate. Anyway life is pretty good here in El Cerrito. I’m not unhappy, sometimes a bit lonely, but not unhappy. There is this girl Laurel a friend of my sister. She’s pretty cute, funny and really smart. I might like to see her but she probably would think I’m too short or something. Maybe someday…maybe in another life.



Christie 

Paul was a Fox. His mother Helen had a little sewing shop just down the street from me when I lived on Grand Avenue back in the late 60s in Oakland, California. Paul was a friend of a neighbor of mine and one time they just stopped by my apartment and I thought “he is incredibly good looking”. Guys didn’t jump on me like other girls. I guess I was off putting or something or maybe I just wasn’t cute enough. But it was a long time before I actually got to know Paul a little bit. 

My friend, the neighbor, moved out, and Paul moved in to the apartment behind me. It was wonderful every time Paul came home from his job at a  long-term parking garage that kept very expensive cars for people who traveled overseas. He actually got to drive them around, keep them in shape. As soon as his door closed you heard Lou Rawls and other great jazz all evening and I loved that. He would kind of hum, drum or snap his fingers to it and I would think “Wow that Paul is such a Fox”. 

Later, much later, I learned that Paul had actually stollen a Porsche from that parking garage where he worked and driven it across state lines as far as the east coast. He was living in New York or New Jersey. He married and he and his wife came out to the west coast. They lived in the mountains near Eugene, Oregon and he drove a logging truck. I learned that the FBI had knocked on the door of their Oregon home and arrested him for that car theft. He went to prison. I later heard probably from Helen that he was released from prison and he had settled in Creswell, a small town just outside of Eugene where we used to go square dancing when I was in college and where I first saw people do the twist at a country dance hall.

It just happened that one August I was driving up to Corvallis for a high school reunion and traveling alone, an unusual thing for me since it was one of the few times I was not burdened with a husband. On the way I pulled off in Creswell and stopped at the little building that said Chamber of Commerce which also doubled as a gas station. I went inside and said hey, do you know Paul? Oh yeah they did and they could get ahold of him. So I spoke with Paul and he said  “oh my gosh I can’t believe you are here! I’ll be right down, but meet me across from the Dairy Queen parking lot because it’s the only place that’s big enough for my truck”. I imagined a pick up truck and was surprised to see a huge log truck pull up and park and Paul coming across the street to meet me. 

What an interesting experience catching up with Paul. He always was a sweet guy as well as being good looking. He told me that he had been recovering from MS. He had been riding rodeo some and working with horses. He had also been a race car driver. He just couldn’t get over that idea of speed. We had a nice conversation and parted and he said he was in San Francisco for horse shows frequently and he would contact me. And indeed he did but as usual the men who always happened into my life—and of course one did—interfered. I felt uncomfortable meeting Paul with my kids to go to the rodeo, which would’ve been a perfectly reasonable thing to do but “c’est la vie”, that’s the way it was.  So I really never saw Paul again and many years later I learned that he had passed away. 

My good friend Laurel, whom I had met in that same apartment building, remained close to Paul’s sister and to his mother Helen. Through Laurel I occasionally heard how life was unfolding for Paul.

Helen was a very instrumental part in both of our lives. She became good friends with my future mother in law. When I met my second husband Jorge, his mother came from Mexico to visit for a long long time. She met Helen and they became friends since they both spoke Spanish. Helen was Spanish. Paul’s father was Italian. The women were about the same age and now single.

Laurel had told me about what was going on with Paul so I kind of knew a little bit before I actually met him in person again.  When we talked, that time that we actually talked, he told me he had never really gotten together with anyone in the years since he separated from his wife and everything that followed. But he said “you know, I meet women but they don’t love jazz the way I love it”. Music was very important to him.

I believe he was kind of a lonely guy. Helen always said I wish my son had married you! I thought Paul would probably not have been happier with me or me with him. But I do wish I had taken advantage of the opportunity to know him better.

So that’s just a little story about the Fox, Paul. May he rest in sweet peace and may Lou Rawls and all his other jazz friends accompany him.



Paul 

Wow Christie you found me again! It was really nice to hear my name called and yeah, I’m here hanging out with my buddies. It’s like when I was a kid and we played jazz and blues in somebodies garage, just kicked around. Except these guys are really talented. That’s what they did in life.

It is pretty cool here, pretty calm and I guess I kind of like that there aren’t so many pressures on us here to do things right. We just kind of roam. There are no rules so there are no rules to break. That’s good.

Anyway yeah, it was really cool seeing you back in Creswell and I always wondered why you turned me down for that rodeo. I guess there was someone else in your life but that’s OK. I’m glad you had someone and I hope your life is good. Sometime I might just get out for a little trip around earth and pay you a visit and we can chat a bit. That would be cool or we might see each other over here someday that would be cool too. Bye for now, Paul.

PS. Mom says hi! She’s making a Spanish Omelet and sharing some brandy Presidente with your mother in law Maria de Jesus. They found each other after you mentioned them in your story.

Oh, by the way, we don’t see each other here. It’s quite like life—all pretty much in our heads (if we had them).


Keep remembering! 

Yesterday—or perhaps during the night—Ali’s paintings unexpectedly returned to me. Perhaps because July 12 would have been my former husband Dick’s ninety-sixth birthday. Memory has its own mysterious rhythm. A single date can illuminate an entire landscape that had been quietly waiting in the shadows.

Whenever we visited Boston, we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking the Public Garden, at the corner of Arlington and Newbury Streets. Dick knew Boston intimately. Although he had built a successful business in California and moved comfortably in artistic circles, he never forgot where he came from. Raised in Chelsea, just across the Mystic River from Boston, he delighted in telling Bostonians he was from Chelsea rather than Boston, simply to watch their puzzled expressions. There was pride in those roots.

Newbury Street was lined with galleries, and one afternoon we wandered into one almost by accident.
There, hanging quietly on the walls, were paintings by an artist named Ali.
They were unlike any circus paintings I had ever seen. There were no cheering crowds or dazzling performances. Instead, the circus existed after the applause had faded. Performers practiced alone beneath impossible night skies. Tents glowed softly in empty fields. Figures waited, reflected, contemplated. The paintings spoke not of spectacle but of solitude.
I was immediately drawn to them, though at the time I did not fully understand why.
Only later did I realize that the answer lay in memories that had come before.

Years earlier, while living in Mexico with my second husband Jorge, I had come to know members of Circus Bell through mutual friends. Jorge and his friends had befriended a young trapeze artist whose career had ended after a terrible fall left her paralyzed. It was her courage that had first brought them together, and their friendship with the circus family continued for years.

Whenever Circus Bell came through town, we gathered to share meals and stories.

Their lives fascinated me. They traveled constantly, often performing outside Mexico. Because they could not easily return with cash, they came home carrying handcrafted objects they had collected abroad, selling them in Mexico to help finance the next journey. It was a simple, resourceful existence—always moving, always beginning again.
They spoke not of glamour but of work, family, endurance, and life on the road.
Without realizing it, they had already taught me to see the circus differently.
So when I later stood before Ali’s paintings in Boston, I wasn’t discovering an unfamiliar world. I was recognizing one. Ali had somehow painted what I had already come to know: the quiet dignity of lives lived beyond the spotlight.

That is why her work touched me so deeply.
I purchased a couple of her lithographs, and they remain among my favorite works of art. Not simply because of her remarkable technique—her luminous use of oil on velvet—but because she gave visual form to something I already carried within me.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t collecting prints.

I was collecting lives.

In recent years, I have begun to notice a pattern that had long escaped me. I thought I had spent my life following places—Lisbon, Paris, Samois-sur-Seine, Puerto Vallarta, Boston. But gradually another truth has emerged.

The places were never really the destination.

They were where I met the people.
Again and again I have found myself drawn to those who live quietly beyond the center of attention: circus families, wandering musicians, organ grinders, travelers, the man on the park bench whose story slowly unfolded over months of passing greetings.
Perhaps that is why Ali’s paintings still speak to me after all these years. She saw what I have always been searching for without fully knowing it myself—not fame or spectacle, but the quiet humanity waiting behind the curtain.
Sometimes our deepest themes do not announce themselves.
They simply accompany us through life, patiently waiting until one unexpected morning they step out of the shadows and into the light.

Following the Melody

A journey in four movements

List of movements 

1. Following Django 
2. Finding Django in Samois sur Seine
3. The Gift
4. We Won’t Know Until We’ve Played It

Following Django
​

Long before I began following musicians through the cafés and concert halls of Puerto Vallarta, another musician quietly changed the way I traveled.

His name was Django Reinhardt.

Looking back, I realize he taught me something long before I ever met the musicians who now fill these pages. He taught me that music does not exist only on a stage. It has a geography. It lives in cafés, along rivers, in family stories, and in the memories of those who keep listening.

My introduction to Django was wonderfully ordinary. Many years ago, while traveling through the southwest of France with a friend, we stopped at a small family-run restaurant deep in the countryside. As we settled into our seats, recorded music floated through the room. My friend immediately recognized it as Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.

That lunch changed something in me.

Our hosts adored Django. His music seemed to belong there as naturally as the homemade foie gras they proudly served. Even today I cannot separate those warm smiles, that quiet French dining room, and the joyous sound of his guitar.

Curiosity became admiration, and admiration slowly became affection. I began reading everything I could find about the remarkable Romani musician who transformed tragedy into beauty. His story seemed almost impossible.

As a young man, Django suffered devastating burns in a fire that left two fingers of his left hand permanently crippled. Most musicians would have accepted that their career was over. Django simply invented another way to play. Using the two healthy fingers that remained, supported by the damaged ones when he could, he created a style unlike anything the world had ever heard.

His music never sounded limited. If anything, it sounded freer.

That resilience certainly inspired me, but it was not the only reason I was drawn to him. I found myself equally fascinated by the man behind the legend—the boy who wandered the streets of Paris with his banjo or guitar, the devoted family man, the fisherman who loved quiet mornings on the Seine, the painter who nearly abandoned music altogether in search of another form of expression.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to see the places that had shaped him. Not museums or monuments, but the landscapes of an ordinary life.

So I planned a journey through France: Paris, Nice, and finally Samois-sur-Seine, where Django spent his last years.

I tried not to burden the trip with expectations. I simply hoped to walk where he had walked and perhaps understand him a little better.

Only much later did I realize that I wasn’t really following Django.

I was learning how to travel.

Until then I had often visited places because history had happened there. Now I was beginning to understand that history is carried by people. The stories that endure are not found only in churches, castles, or museums. They survive in neighborhood cafés, in family memories, and in the quiet routines of ordinary days.

Years later, when I found myself listening to musicians in Puerto Vallarta, asking about their lives, writing about their music, and eventually becoming friends with many of them, I thought I had discovered something entirely new.

I hadn’t.

Without realizing it, I was still following the path Django had shown me years before.

I have never really traveled in search of concerts.

I travel in search of people whose lives have found expression through music.

I did not know it then, but Django had given me something far more enduring than beautiful music. He had quietly taught me how to listen for the people behind it.


***


Finding Django in Samois-sur-Seine

When I arrived in Samois-sur-Seine, I came with almost no plans.

I knew this quiet village outside Paris had been Django Reinhardt’s last home. I knew he had fished the Seine, painted, played billiards with friends, and lived there with his wife Naguine and their son Babik until his death in 1953.

Beyond that, I expected very little.

One of the dangers of making a pilgrimage is expecting too much. Reality rarely resembles the stories we have created in our imagination, so I decided to arrive with curiosity instead of expectations.

The surprises began before I even reached Samois.

On my first evening in Paris, while searching for jazz performances, one name caught my attention: Simba Baumgartner.

Surely it couldn’t be.

But it was.

Simba is Django Reinhardt’s great-grandson.

My daughter Laura, who had joined me for the first part of the trip, and I crossed the Seine to a small club on the Left Bank where he and his trio were performing. The room was intimate, the audience close enough to feel every note, glasses clinking softly between songs as conversation gave way to music. Much of the evening featured compositions from his new recording. Django’s spirit was unmistakably present, yet Simba’s own voice was equally clear.

Later I learned something that pleased me even more. Simba and his family lived quietly on the outskirts of Samois-sur-Seine in a modest house with a caravan nearby. I smiled at the thought. Django himself had begun married life in a caravan, surrounded by family and friends. The circumstances were different, of course, but the continuity was unmistakable. The music had remained part of everyday life. It had never become a museum piece.

The past had introduced itself before my journey had truly begun.

When I finally reached Samois, the surprises continued.

Walking toward the river on my first afternoon, I noticed a simple plaque on a nearby house.

It was Django’s home.

I hadn’t even begun looking for it.

As I stood there taking it in, a gentleman walking his dog stopped to ask if he could help. We began talking, and when I explained why I had come, he smiled.

He was Raynard, the grandson of Fernand, one of Django’s closest friends.

Within minutes I found myself hearing stories that no guidebook could ever contain.

His family had owned Chez Fernand, the neighborhood café where Django often stopped for tea before heading out to fish or spending an afternoon playing billiards with friends. Although the café had changed hands, the memories remained vivid, lovingly preserved from one generation to the next.

Standing in the rooms where Django had lived, only steps from the Seine, I realized that history is not always preserved in monuments.

Sometimes it survives because families continue telling stories.

The following morning I walked to the village cemetery.

It took some searching before I found Django’s grave, but once I did there was no mistaking it. Members of the Reinhardt family rested together, as so many French families do. Flowers and small tributes surrounded the tomb.

What moved me most, however, were two simple guitar picks resting quietly on the stone.

Someone had left them there.

I had brought nothing to leave behind. For a moment I wished I had.

Then I realized admiration does not always require an object.

Sometimes showing up is enough.

During my stay I had another unexpected encounter. I met the former mayor of Samois-sur-Seine, a man who had devoted years to helping build the annual Django Reinhardt Festival into the remarkable celebration it has become. He had just published a book about the festival’s history and the extraordinary musicians who had gathered there over the years.

When I told him that a musician friend and I hoped someday to organize a small festival in Puerto Vallarta, he seemed genuinely delighted. He opened his book, wrote a warm personal inscription encouraging our efforts, and signed it for me.

Not long afterward, the owner of the little café who had introduced us presented me with another gift—a poster from that year’s Django Festival.

Neither gesture was expected.

Both felt deeply personal.

For years that poster reminded me of the kindness I had found in Samois. Then, when I eventually left Puerto Vallarta, I knew exactly where it belonged. I gave it to a dear musician friend whose love of jazz manouche matched my own. Somehow that seemed fitting. The poster had continued its journey, carrying a small piece of Samois to another corner of the world.

One evening I wandered back toward the river intending only to enjoy a glass of wine at the restaurant that now occupied the site of the old Chez Fernand.

Instead, I stayed for dinner.

A fire glowed in the enormous fireplace. Crystal reflected the warm light. Outside, the Seine moved almost silently past the windows.

The owner recommended a red Burgundy from nearby Beaune and served what remains one of the finest pieces of cod I have ever eaten.

I remember almost nothing of our conversation.

I remember everything about the feeling.

Peace.

As I sat beside the river, I understood that I had not come to meet a legend.

I had come to discover the life that surrounded the legend.

The cafés.

The neighbors.

The family.

The fishermen.

The musicians.

The quiet rhythm of an ordinary village.

When I first planned this journey, I thought I was following the footsteps of one extraordinary guitarist.

Looking back now, I realize I was witnessing something much larger.

I was seeing how beauty survives.

A great-grandson continues to play.

A family preserves old friendships.

A former mayor devotes years to honoring a festival.

A café owner shares its history with strangers.

A traveler from California carries home a book, a poster, and a handful of stories.

None of these people were trying to preserve a monument.

They were simply living generously, passing along something they loved.

Years later, when I found myself writing about musicians in Puerto Vallarta, becoming friends with them, introducing audiences to their music, and telling their stories, I thought I had discovered a new passion.

I hadn’t.

Without realizing it, I was still following the path that had begun beside the Seine.

Django Reinhardt died in 1953.

Yet somehow, in that little village, he was still introducing people to one another.
Perhaps that is how music truly endures—not only through recordings or concerts, but because ordinary people quietly choose to carry it forward.
I like to think that, for a brief moment, I became one small part of that continuing melody.



***



The Gift
Sometimes the greatest gift a piece of writing can receive is not praise but recognition.

When I sent my essay about Django Reinhardt to my friend Alejandro, I thought I was sharing my own memories of Samois-sur-Seine and the remarkable people I had met there. Instead, he quietly handed the story back to me.
He told me I had a gypsy spirit.

Then he remembered.

As a boy, he had discovered a recording of Django Reinhardt and found himself captivated by the music. Years later, he remembered my traveling from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City simply to hear his group perform on the roof of a museum overlooking the Zócalo. I had thought I was the fortunate one, grateful for his music and his friendship. His response reminded me that friendship is rarely one-sided.

When we first met, I sensed something generous in Alejandro’s nature. As we said goodbye that day, he smiled and said, “Let’s not lose track of one another.”

We didn’t.

Over the years our friendship has never depended on favors, recognition, or expectations. It has been sustained by something quieter—a reciprocal regard, a genuine delight in each other’s journeys. Those friendships are rare. They cannot be manufactured. They grow naturally because each person sees something in the other worth preserving.
As I reflected on his message, I realized he was not simply responding to an essay about Django.

He was telling me, “I remember too.”

Perhaps that is one of the truest signs of friendship. Someone receives your story and answers not with applause but with a memory of their own. The conversation becomes larger than either person’s experience. It becomes something shared.
Looking back, I think that has happened many times in my life.

I have often believed I was traveling to hear music.
Perhaps I was really traveling to meet people whose lives would become intertwined with my own.

The music was simply the invitation.



***



We Won’t Know Until We’ve Played It
I have always loved jazz, though I have never been able to explain exactly why.

A jazz musician begins with a familiar melody. We recognize it immediately. Then, almost before we have settled into it, he leaves it behind. For several minutes he wanders through unexpected harmonies and rhythms. If we are impatient, we may wonder whether he has lost his way. But somehow he hasn’t. The melody has never really disappeared. It has simply been living beneath the surface, quietly waiting.

Then, near the end, it returns.

Only now it is no longer the same melody because we are no longer the same listeners.

Recently I came across an interview with the Argentine novelist Andrés Neuman. He was describing the freedom of writing poetry, where, he says, the syntax itself becomes “a living creature in search of something to say.” He writes not to express thoughts he already possesses, but to discover what he thinks and feels while writing.

I stopped reading.
For a moment I simply sat there smiling.

Finally, I thought, someone has described the way my own mind seems to work.

For years I assumed that good writers knew where they were going before they began. They started with an idea and carefully led the reader toward it.

My experience has been almost the opposite.

A piece usually begins with something very small: a gust of wind in Portugal, a cat demanding breakfast, a stranger on a bench, a concert in Berkeley, a cup of coffee in Lisbon. I rarely know why these moments have caught my attention. They simply refuse to let go.

So I begin writing.

Pessoa wanders into the conversation. Then Django Reinhardt. Then perhaps a memory of Provence, or the sound of the ocean, or a remark from one of my children. At times it feels as though I have wandered far away from where I started.

But have I?

Looking back, I don’t think so.

There has always been a melody beneath the improvisation.

Neuman writes that even when planning a novel, he knows the plan will fail. Yet he needs it because the failed plan is what begins the journey. He compares it to travel. We make lists of places we hope to visit, only to discover, almost immediately after arriving, something entirely different that changes the trip forever.

How true that has been in my own life.

I have traveled in search of cities and found people instead.
I have gone looking for Django and discovered lifelong friendships.
I have followed Pessoa through the streets of Lisbon only to discover that I was really following my own questions.
Again and again, the itinerary has quietly given way to something better.

Perhaps writing is no different.

Perhaps travel, music, and writing all ask the same thing of us.
Pay attention.
The jazz musician pays attention to where the melody wishes to go.

The writer pays attention to where the sentence wishes to go.

The traveler pays attention to what was never on the itinerary.

None of them begins with certainty.
They begin with trust.

When I think back over the essays I have written during these past few years, I realize they were never really about cats or coffee, music or travel. Those were simply the opening notes. The meaning revealed itself only after I had stayed with the melody long enough to hear where it wanted to lead me.
Maybe that is why I have always loved jazz.

Not because it is unpredictable, but because it teaches patience.

It reminds us that understanding does not always arrive at the beginning. Sometimes it waits quietly until the final phrase, then suddenly illuminates everything that came before.

Then I remembered a rainy evening in Querétaro.

I had gone well out of my way to hear my friend Caleb and his trio, Media Luna, play in a tiny café in Querétaro. Rain poured down all evening until the power finally went out. No one left. We simply sat together in the darkness, listening as the trio continued to play without amplifiers.
After the performance Caleb thanked me for coming, but then said something I have never forgotten.

“I love that, unlike other fans, you really pay attention to the music—every note, every nuance.”

At the time, I simply took it as a generous compliment.

Years later, reading Andrés Neuman, I realized Caleb had noticed something about me before I had. It wasn’t that I listened to jazz carefully. It was that paying attention was the way I moved through the world.

I imagine…

The musicians have finished playing. 

The audience has gone home. 

The instruments rest in silence.

Someone asks, “So what was the piece about?”
There is a long pause.

Finally, someone smiles.
“We won’t know until we’ve played it.”

The older I become, the more I suspect that is true not only of jazz, but of writing, travel, and perhaps even life itself.
There’s a lovely line by the essayist Montaigne: “I do not portray being. I portray passing.” He wasn’t trying to construct a grand philosophy. He was trying to understand himself as he moved through life. 

Every morning, I wake up to an explosion of color and joy.

When I open my eyes, there it is.

Years ago, in Paris, I visited a wonderful exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie of the works of Robert Delaunay and his wife, Sonia. Together with other artists, they helped create the Orphist movement, an extension of Cubism that abandoned muted tones in favor of brilliant, luminous color. I loved their work. Before returning home, I acquired a large print of Robert Delaunay’s dancing circles. It now graces the wall of my cave-like bedroom in Oakland.

How appropriate that many years later I discovered that their son, Charles Delaunay, was the man responsible for bringing Django Reinhardt into the limelight and, with him, the guitar into the forefront of jazz.

Charles, the only son of two extraordinarily busy and successful artists, was passionate about jazz and fortunate enough to indulge that passion. Along with other enthusiasts, he founded the famous Club Hot de France. Through his tireless efforts, Django became known far beyond the cafés and dance halls where he had first astonished audiences.

Django loved making music, but he loved freedom even more. Keeping a schedule was not one of his gifts. It is said that Charles and Django’s brother, Nin-Nin, often had to search Paris for him and practically drag him to his performances. On one memorable occasion, after becoming absorbed in conversation with a French boxer in a New York bar, Django nearly missed his celebrated appearance with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. He arrived late—without a tuxedo and without a guitar. Neither Charles nor Nin-Nin was there to rescue him that evening.

I sometimes think we owe Charles Delaunay more than history usually acknowledges. Without his persistence, Django’s music might never have reached so many ears. I can imagine no better image for those sounds than Robert Delaunay’s vibrant circles dancing across my bedroom wall each morning.

Last night I attended a concert presented by my neighbor, Michael Graham, the celebrated cellist whose Berkelium Quartet has begun hosting intimate concerts in private homes around the neighborhood. Their first performance took place just around the corner from me.

Nineteenth-century music in a nineteenth-century Victorian home.

What a delight.

The program opened with Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 127. I am hardly sophisticated in classical music, yet this work commanded my complete attention. Much of the audience consisted of musicians, and the conversations during intermission were as fascinating as the performance itself. I walked home in the dark, filled with music, and went immediately to bed.

This morning I awoke to another day.

Robert Delaunay’s festival of color greeted me from the wall. Beethoven’s wild imagination, written nearly two centuries ago, still echoed in my mind after being brought to life in one of Oakland’s colorful Victorian homes. And Charles Delaunay, almost unnoticed in history, quietly reminded me of the music he helped bring into the world through Django Reinhardt.

One family painted with color.

Another man painted with sound.

And somehow, decades later, they all meet on the wall beside my bed.

Scherzando.

People often ask, “What have you been doing?”
​
It is a reasonable question. We measure our lives by activities and accomplishments. We traveled here. We attended that concert. We repaired the fence. We finished a project. We can make a list and check things off one by one.
But I sometimes wonder if a more important question might be:
“What have you been thinking about?”

The things we do often fade surprisingly quickly. Last year's trip becomes a collection of photographs. The concert ticket becomes a souvenir tucked into a drawer. Even major accomplishments eventually become part of the background of our lives.

Yet some thoughts stay with us for decades.

A conversation overheard in a coffee shop.
A sentence from a book.
A film whose title has been forgotten but whose meaning continues to deepen.
A man sitting on a park bench every morning.

The event itself may pass, but the reflection remains alive.

This may explain why I write.

Writing allows me to discover what I actually think. An experience enters my life as an event, but it becomes meaningful only when I spend time with it. The act of writing often reveals truths I did not know I was carrying. I begin with a story and end with an insight.

I love live music. The music itself is why I go. I sit among strangers and listen to gifted musicians create something beautiful that exists only for that moment.

Yet at home I rarely play music.

What I seek at home is stillness.

Silence leaves room for thought.

It creates a space where questions can emerge.

Who am I becoming?

Why did that moment affect me so deeply?

What am I meant to learn from this season of life?

At eighty-four, I am less interested in collecting experiences than in understanding them. Doing enriches life. Thinking gives it meaning.

Perhaps the richest life is not one filled with the greatest number of activities, but one in which experience and reflection remain in conversation with each other.

We do.

We think.
​
And somewhere between the two, we discover who we are.
​

This morning I wandered onto a site on my iPhone called WanderTrivia. Given my lifelong love of travel, it caught my attention. At first I nearly dismissed it. The opening section listed common mistakes travelers make, and after years of wandering through Europe and Mexico I found myself thinking, I know all this already.

But then the article took an unexpected turn. Instead of offering travel tips, it began explaining how travel affects the brain.

It suggested that new experiences slow our perception of time because the brain records unfamiliar surroundings in richer detail. Shared adventures strengthen relationships through the release of oxytocin, the so-called “bonding hormone.” Even attempting a few words in another language stimulates neuroplasticity, encouraging the brain to form new connections.

It went on to describe how time in nature allows our overworked attention to recover, how stepping away from deadlines lowers cortisol while increasing serotonin and dopamine, how even a four-day vacation can reduce biological markers of stress, and how living outdoors more naturally restores our sleep cycles.

I found myself reading more slowly.

Not because I was planning another trip, but because I realized that these observations seemed to apply to life itself.

Perhaps travel is simply one way of creating the conditions that allow our minds and spirits to flourish.

Novelty.
Attention.
Connection.
Language.
Nature.
Rest.
Presence.

Travel conveniently gathers all of these into one experience, but maybe it doesn’t own them.

I believe Fernando Pessoa was right. He often imagined journeys without leaving Lisbon, believing the imagination itself could become a form of travel. Maybe what changes us is not always crossing an ocean. Maybe it is learning to see differently.

A walk through the redwoods.
Several quiet hours alone on a deserted beach.
Listening carefully to a musician you have never heard before.
Learning a few words of Portuguese.
Sharing a sunset with someone you love.
Even reading a remarkable novel can transport us into another country of the mind.

These moments awaken us because they interrupt routine. They ask us to become fully present. They invite us to notice.

Over the past year I have found myself writing about seemingly ordinary experiences: a cat demanding breakfast, a stranger sitting on a park bench, conversations after concerts, films that linger long after the credits have rolled, walks through my own neighborhood. None of these required a passport. Yet each carried me somewhere I had not been before. 

Writing itself may be one of the purest forms of travel. It asks us not merely to experience life but to return to it, to look more carefully, and to discover what we missed the first time.

We often think attention follows interest.

I am beginning to suspect the opposite.

Interest follows attention.

When we truly attend to something, it begins to reveal itself. An ordinary morning becomes a story. A conversation becomes a friendship. A familiar neighborhood becomes new again.

We spend a great deal of money searching for places that will change us. Sometimes they do. But perhaps the greatest gift of travel is not the destination. It is reminding us how to look. Once we recover that way of seeing, we can bring it home.

Then the morning walk becomes an expedition. A neighborhood café becomes a salon. A conversation becomes a journey. The familiar world, patiently waiting all along, becomes wonderfully unfamiliar once again.

Perhaps the richest journeys are not measured in miles, but in the depth with which we encounter the world.

“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.”
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

It seemed fitting that I heard the group Olas Perdidas on Father’s Day.

The evening was filled not only with music but with stories—stories of fathers, sons, tradition, and the ways we carry forward the gifts we have been given.

At one point Xocoyotzin played a harp built many years ago by his father. As he explained the workings of the instrument to his young son, the music itself seemed to become a conversation across generations.
The harp was no longer simply an instrument. It was a family story made visible and audible.
What we were hearing had traveled from father to son and now to another generation waiting to inherit it.

That sense of continuity ran throughout the evening.

Both Todd Hannigan and Xocoyotzin Moraza  grew up in Ventura, California, though nearly a generation apart. When they eventually met, they recognized something familiar in one another. Both were shaped by the sea, by surfing culture, and by a deep appreciation for the landscapes and communities that formed them. The ocean seemed present even when it was never mentioned, rising and falling beneath the music like an unseen tide.

What fascinated me was the way they blended influences that might seem unlikely companions. The traditional sounds of Veracruz met the cinematic landscapes of the American West. The result was neither fusion nor compromise. It felt more like a conversation between old friends. Each tradition retained its identity while making room for the other.

The addition of electric guitarist Jesse Siebenberg has expanded that conversation even further. His mastery of the lap steel guitar evokes the haunting sounds familiar from Sergio Leone films, creating moments that linger long after the final note has faded. Alongside him, percussionist Lenny Castro brings remarkable energy and color, drawing an astonishing range of sounds from instruments both familiar and unexpected.

Yet what remains with me most is not any individual performance. It is the spirit of the group itself. Their music reflects curiosity rather than certainty, respect rather than nostalgia. They honor where they come from while remaining open to where the journey may lead.

Perhaps that is why the audience seemed so captivated. We were not simply hearing songs. We were witnessing traditions in motion—crossing borders, generations, and cultures without losing themselves.

A final detail perfectly captured the evening’s spirit. Olas Perdidas is preparing to release its first album, and it will be on vinyl. Somehow that seems exactly right: a group looking both backward and forward at the same time, carrying old stories into new waters. 

Their music seemed to move like the coastal winds they celebrate—crossing boundaries without regard for maps, carrying stories from one generation and one culture to the next.

The Wind Remains

Yesterday the organ grinder died.

Not peacefully. Painfully. Yet surrounded by those who loved him and at peace with the life he had lived. The parting was difficult for those he left behind, as all partings are, but they survived. They moved forward carrying both grief and gratitude. Those who truly love us do not forget.

As I finished Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, I found myself thinking not only about the characters but about what became of them afterward.

Hans left behind the dream of his old life and continued his journey.

Sophie learned that she could not remain where she was. To fulfill her own destiny she would have to change, to move, to become someone new.

Álvaro, I suspect, moved on as well, carried by the same restless currents that brought him to Wandernburg in the first place.

Monsieur Gottlieb, I fear, may have continued down the path that was already consuming him.

Lisa and Elsa? Perhaps they left together. Perhaps separately. It hardly matters. The important thing is that they, too, were caught in the great movement that animates the entire novel.

Everyone arrives.

Everyone departs.

Everyone changes.

The citizens who seemed respectable reveal themselves to be hypocrites. The outsiders often prove wiser than those who claim certainty. Love appears unexpectedly and disappears before it can become permanent. Ideas cross borders more easily than people. Cultures mingle, clash, and enrich one another.

Yet as I reflected on the story, I realized that perhaps the most important character was not a person at all.

It was the wind.

The wind is always present in Neuman’s novel. It arrives carrying news, gossip, ideas, music, and strangers. It moves through the streets and conversations. It never truly arrives because it was already there. It never truly departs because it remains after everyone else has gone.

The wind is life itself.

The wind is time.

The wind is death.

The wind is memory.

The day I finished the novel, I attended a concert by Olas Perdidas—“Lost Waves.”

The title itself seemed to echo the book.

Waves vanish, yet the sea remains.

People leave, yet their influence continues.

Music ends, yet something of it lingers in the listener.

What I heard that evening was more than music. I heard curiosity. I heard acceptance. I heard tradition meeting innovation. I heard cultures crossing oceans and returning transformed. I heard freedom.

Listening, I realized that the concert and the novel were speaking about the same thing.

Life is movement.

We spend much of our lives trying to hold things still—places, relationships, identities, memories. Yet the deepest wisdom may be learning to welcome change without surrendering what is essential.

The traveler understands this.

The organ grinder understands this.

The musicians understand this.

The wind understands this.

And perhaps, if we are fortunate, we come to understand it too.

Everyone arrives.

Everyone departs.

The waves are lost.

The music fades.

The conversations end.

But the wind remains, carrying what we have given to one another into places we will never see.

And perhaps that is enough.

​After my father passed away, a friend of my mother’s said to me, “Christie, why don’t you take your mother to Europe with you?”

At first, I dismissed the idea.

My mother and I got along wonderfully, but we were very different people. I loved traveling through Europe, lingering over cappuccinos, visiting museums, and enjoying good food and wine. My mother’s tastes were much simpler. I wondered if she would find my habits extravagant. I wondered if we would enjoy the same things. Mostly, I wondered how it would work.

Months later, an opportunity arose to visit New Orleans, a place my mother had always wanted to see. I decided it would be a good test.

At that time, Mom seemed remarkably strong. 

At 84 she walked every day. She swam regularly. We all thought of her as energetic and capable of handling anything.
Looking back, I realize the trip itself must have been challenging. She traveled alone by shuttle from Tucson to Phoenix Airport and met me there. My mother had rarely traveled by herself. She had always traveled with my father.
But the trip was a success. We had a wonderful time.

Encouraged, we planned something more ambitious: France and Italy.

Mom flew to Oakland. The next day we boarded a flight from San Francisco to Paris. She was tired from the journey but remained cheerful and adventurous.

Then, on perhaps the third day, everything changed.

While visiting the Musée d’Orsay, she suffered what appeared to be a medical episode, possibly brought on by being off schedule with her medications. An ambulance took her to Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, where she spent the night.
The staff were kind. Mom was a good sport, as always.

But it frightened me.

For the first time, I realized that my mother might be vulnerable.

Until then, I had thought only about practical things. I booked ground-floor accommodations so she would not have to climb stairs. I knew she was no longer running around the block. Yet I still imagined her as fundamentally unchanged.
The incident in Paris forced me to see something different.

Fortunately, she recovered quickly. We continued our journey through the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, Provence and eventually Nice before crossing into Italy to visit places my sister Lynda had loved for so many years.
Those days became some of the most precious of my life.

I drove. Mom often dozed in the passenger seat. Then she would wake and begin talking. She told stories about her youth, old boyfriends, dances she remembered, and experiences I had never heard before. We weren’t simply traveling together; we were getting to know one another in a new way.

I noticed other changes as well.

Although I had deliberately chosen places where she could continue her beloved swimming, she rarely showed any interest. She tired more easily. Little by little, I realized that changes were occurring, even if neither of us wanted to acknowledge them.

The following year we traveled to Sedona.

By then she had acquired a cane. I remember being surprised by that. My mother had always resisted anything that suggested limitation. Yet there she was, carrying a little cane and using it without much fuss. Together we enjoyed the red rocks, the beautiful desert light, and Sedona’s unique atmosphere.

Again, we had a wonderful time.

The next year we did not travel together. Instead, my sister accompanied her to Oregon to visit my youngest sister and family near Bend. During that trip, my sisters noticed something that the rest of us had not fully recognized: Mom was falling frequently.

Soon afterward, matters became urgent.

Back in Arizona, the falls increased dramatically. She was taken back to Oregon, where doctors diagnosed normal pressure hydrocephalus. Fortunately, it was treatable. After surgery to place a shunt, she improved remarkably. She regained mobility, transitioned from a wheelchair to a walker, and much of her memory returned.

The experience taught me something important.

Sometimes it takes a crisis before we truly recognize the reality of aging.

At eighty-five, certain things are simply going to happen. Not because someone has failed or become weak, but because aging eventually catches up with all of us.

Our parents need us to notice.

They need us to stay involved, to keep in touch, to step forward when help is needed.

I find myself thinking about this now from the other side.

For most of my life, my children saw me as energetic, capable, and independent. And for the most part, I was. But in recent years I have experienced my own series of health challenges and setbacks.

My daughter Ariel witnessed many of them firsthand and helped me through difficult periods. My other children, however, did not fully see how much these events affected me until recently, when circumstances required them to step in themselves.

I think they understand now.

Not that I need to be pampered. Not that I need people telling me what to do.

But I do need what every aging parent needs: concern, attention, communication, and occasional help.
And they have been wonderful.

We talk more. We check in more often. They pay attention.

I am deeply grateful for that.

The lesson I learned through my mother is the same lesson I hope my children carry forward.
The people who once cared for us, protected us, and seemed capable of handling anything do not suddenly stop being those people. They are still themselves. They still want independence. They still want dignity.
But a time comes when they may need us in ways they never needed us before.

Being present. Paying attention. Answering the phone. Showing up.

Those things matter more than we realize.

My mother taught me that.

Now life is teaching the same lesson to my children.
And someday, I suspect, life will teach it to theirs as well.

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