Au Revoir Victor
When
I asked our little girl, Victor’s 8 year old Goddaughter, what she
thought about when she thinks about Victor, she said, “His cooking. His
food makes you feel all good inside.” Coming from a kid that
might sound as if he made the greatest chicken fingers and hotdogs in
the world, but get this: our kid loves everything from tofu to foie
gras. Case in point: last month we went to a fancy restaurant to
celebrate her birthday, and when they served us a foie gras appetizer,
she said, “Um, this doesn’t taste anything like foie gras. This
doesn’t taste anything like anything! They just slapped this together,
Mommy.” And, in fact, she was right. She loved Victor’s
cooking because Victor was a gourmet chef who cooked with heart.
When you ate food Victor cooked, you were sated physically and
emotionally.
When I told our little girl last week that Victor was sick, she clamped
her hands over her ears and said, “Don’t tell me, Mommy." Then she turned to her father and said, "I don’t
want to hear, Daddy.” I said, “Okay, but it’s serious. If he
doesn’t make it, you want me not to tell you?” She kept her hands
over her ears, “I don’t want to know.” So this week has been a
lot of Mommy crying and blaming the tears on stubbed toes. She
just isn’t in a place to let go of a man who meant so much to her.
And this was Victor through her eyes -- a man who was so often smiling
for adults, but who looked as if sunbeams had been injected directly
into him when a kid came into the picture. There was no talking
down to kids with Victor. Victor was a giant, walking (and very
interesting, I might add) encyclopedia for everyone, including kids.
Yet he still wanted to soak in and learn, even from kids. When our
little girl went to visit Uncle Victor, he’d take her hand from the
time she could walk, and walk her through his gardens and talk to her
about everything and let her eat whatever was up for being picked, and
whenever she did something that was remotely “kid-like”, Victor would
take great pride in the discovery, as if, perhaps, picking an apple and
looking at it a certain way was a major breakthrough in science.
He loved children for all the right reasons. And when he spoke,
the children in his life (past and present) were weaved throughout the
fabric of his talk, as if they were the commas in all his prose.
And for me, at 48? Well, Victor managed to touch on the kid in
me, too. He was willing to meet me anywhere I needed to be met:
at a tournament in Scrabble where my scholastic intellect came out
fiercely competitive; over dinner with friends, discussing politics and
history; at a café table where I had many questions to ask about why he
thought this or that happened in life; in the kitchen to discuss why,
oh, why his wife, Karen and I loved each other so so so so much, yet
fought like sisters, and how could we arrive at a better place.
Victor rose to all the occasions.
As with everyone, I’m going to miss Victor. Too much. I’ll
miss his garden. I’ll miss what he did with the things from his
garden. I’ll miss the way his face looked when he stopped to
think about something small I’d said (he really stopped to
think). I’ll tremendously miss his sense of humor and the way he
would take me on drives in the middle of nowhere in France and zip onto
a road he’d never traveled before when I’d ask him, “What’s
there?” His need for discovery was magical. In the garden, in the
kitchen, in the books, out of the books, with friends, on the road –
everywhere Victor was on a search to discover the new things. And
if you think about it, that’s pretty rare to find in adults. Most
adults just plod along trying to get from point A to point B.
Victor realized that the point A and point B things were about as
important as the plates on the table – important for presentation, but
nothing compared to the journey it took to cook up the experience.
I’m trying to end this tribute to Victor, but there isn’t a way to end
it. For one thing, none of us can believe Victor isn’t here any
longer. I still find it hard to fathom the hole Provence will now
always have for our child and us. I don’t even want to explore the
empty hole I have inside – the hole that is so large that there’s
almost no room for anything else except that giant emptiness.
Bill and I are just like our kid. We want to put our hands
over our ears and say, “No, don’t tell us. We don’t want to
hear.”
So Victor, wherever you are on your new path of discovery, I’m still
going to see you again in Provence and I’m still going to beat your ass
at Scrabble; and Bill's still going to ask you to tell him that good
story just one more time; and our kid is still going to pick all the
best flowers from your garden; and if for some reason all of this is
true and we don’t see
you again, just know this: we’ll always be searching for you, and we
know we’ll find you in all the important details.
To the rock, babe. To the rock!
Love,
Sarah
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