I might have overlooked St. Patrick's day this year, as it's not celebrated here in France, but for the Italian tradition of calling friends and family on one's saint's day. My host here, while I'm staying in Paris, is named Patrizia - guess there's no Saint Patrizia - so the answering machine was clogged yesterday with calls from her friends and relatives at home in Italy wishing her good health. Not a bad thing. But St. Paddy's day no longer means Irish parades and people drinking green beer (and vomiting equally green vomit) for me, and I'm sure many of you feel the same. Of course I think of Rick from time to time all year long. I'll see in the newspaper the dismally poor scores of the Albert Lea students taking the state graduation requirement exam and grab the phone to rub it in - but I don't know Rick's number anymore. And this time of year is always weirder than usual. Tuesday I just sat in a cafe all day and read a book I picked up as an afterthought on my way out the door; Hemmingway in parallel text, Italian/English. There's a man obsessed with death. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, about death by gangrene. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macornbie, his wife blew his head off with a hunting rifle, and Old Man at the Bridge, death of the old in wartime. It's a virtual death-a-thon.

I've been reminded of Rick for the last couple of weeks. Last week I was skiing in the French Alps and had to cut the Colorado lift tickets from my ski jacket, those from the last ski trip I took with Rick. I've been skiing only once since that trip. And I'm often reminded here of conversing with Rick in our cockney French. When I arrived at Patrizia's apartment in Paris I found her playing her new disc, The Best (sic) of Joan Baez. I choked on "Diamonds and Rust", the Baez tribute to Dylan. "Well I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again." It's the last song Rick learned to play on guitar. He played the first two stanzas for me and I said, "Not Diamond and Rust, please." "Why not?" he asked. In the song she quotes Dylan as telling her that her poetry is lousy. It is. It sucks. She tries to put 5 pounds of lyrics on a 2-pound bag and it's a predictable mess. Exactly the opposite of Dylan, who is spare of words, I told him. Like the poetry of Jim Morrison.

So yesterday on St. Paddy's day I searched out Morrison's tomb here in Le Pere Lachaise cemetery. I know Rick would have. Jim Morrison, 1943 - 1971, buried among the graves of Oscar Wilde, Moliere, and Chopin. You need to buy a map to find him. He draws a big crowd, too. On his low, sandy grave boxed in with bricks, fans left cigarettes, letters, guitar picks, poems, candles and daffodils. I had nothing to offer. I did have a camera and was suitably dressed all in black. So I talked to a young group from Naples (not Florida) in Italian telling them I needed their help, (since Rick wasn't there) in an artistic endeavor. It was going to cause some problems for some people at the grave site, some shock (in Italian, lo shock, pretty handy.)

One Neapolitan pointed to another as "almost a professional photographer" and I instructed him on our photo shoot. I then chucked my jacket and jumped into Morrison's low crypt like someone getting into bed, striking a death pose. "Nature Morte", I called it. Roberto began snapping pictures as fast as possible. Some of the more death-sensitive and art ignorant cretins in the crowd gasped and chattered. I directed the shoot from my comfortable grave, in Italian. I heard some indignant Boston accent tell another that the guy in the grave wasn't American; he was American. I would have told him that we're not all as talentless in languages as he apparently was, but I was busy being dead. Roberto finished my roll of film; I got up, dusted myself off, and thanked the boys for their effort. I'll post the pictures here later on.

Today, I've decided to hang out on a bench here in front of Note Dame on this suitably gray day to jot this down. That and to work on revisions of some songs I've been writing. They're not too wordy. And there's no death in them - just love, love lost, found and just plain being bad. The sun is poking through now, and it's great to be alive in Paris today. Before I return to go jogging with Patrizia and to prepare dinner, I'm going to light a candle in Rick's honor in the name of all of us that knew and loved him. I can't help but to weep over this. Good thing I have my sun glasses on.