Today you would have been 77 and perhaps we would be walking along a densely flowered path, approaching the sea.  I do not view birthdays as a time for looking back but as a barometer of what may come.  You preferred no reminders, no cards, no celebrations and no gifts.  But I insisted on all, at times extending your birthdays to a week.  You were always slightly amused, gracious and unabashedly embarrassed.  But no more, my Farzin.  All is at an end, as you wanted.

“Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
…Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, “Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.”

                                                                                            ― Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems: A Sequence 

Marc Chagall’s Nice and the Côte d’Azur series.

Brimming with romance, enchantment, beauty and vivid colors, Chagall’s painting brings forth memories of our first trip abroad together, the warm sun and clear, tranquil, blue waters of the Mediterranean.  It was serene, exciting, new, romantic, and profoundly poignant in its effect upon me and our future.