Michel and Jules, Cannes, French Riviera, 1975.

To Noah, with love, always …

Life is passing by – fast and furious, like a torrent fed by the eternal snows of the Kilimanjaro.

I feel like a fish in the river.  Fighting the surge … carried by the current towards the deep dark blue of pelagic eternity.

I love the water on my skin.  I love the first bite of the cold.  I love feeling alive.  I love feeling the evolution of life carried in my genes.  The fish bones in my spine.  The lungs of cetacean cousins in my chest.  I love the meditation of the swim … the slow crawl of ideas propelled by the torsion of my muscle in this long and continuous rhythmic dance.

I love diving alone.  I love the solitude of the reef.

Does the river even know of my existence?  What trace does a fish leave behind in the water?  An undulation … a shadow … a spark … a few ripples … there a moment and gone with the flow …  Nothing much really I am thinking – even the big fishes with their big wings … just a few ripples ….

The river will run for ever – without memories – fresh every day, always fast and furious.

I have a rather sad nostalgic nature … « nostalgique et désabusé » as Jane B. would say.  I have a poor memory and yet I remember so well what is important in life and in people.

I found some old photographs.  In one of them I am the same ages as Noah … maybe a few months older, at most.  I look like a fish jumping out of water.  Out of the blue.   « La Grande Bleue » as they call it in the south of France.  I remember it well.  I still feel the freedom of the flight and the embrace of the sea.

Fathers look at their sons.  They look for traces, for shadows, sparks and ripples.  I see some of my instinctive undulations in his smiles.

I think that he loves the water as well.  Not cold like the streams of the Kilimanjaro.  He has his mother’s African blood – closer to Matobo or the Okavango delta.

Fathers look at their sons.  They see life gushing by.  They see their genes passing by … blue, like water on pebbles.

When I was Noah’s age, fourteen or fifteen at most, I went to Brussels and bought two pairs of blue jeans with my pocket money.  The real Levi Strauss 550 – 31-32 – from Frisco.  My favorite jeans.  I wore them for ten years at least … until the 31 no longer fit.  Later, in my years of 32’s and 33’s, I thought with nostalgia of these first jeans … and with foolish hope never gave them up.

Now, forty years later, I passed them to my son … with the hope that one day, in another thirty or forty years, these jeans will be passed to his son.

Life is passing by – fast and furious – and blue are the genes passing with the flow …