Une Bonne Promenade , Gâté

A picture of a father and his young son, both smiling, squinting. The son, alone, gazing up from the water's edge. Pictures just like the ones we all have -- in our minds, in old shoeboxes, on cell phones. Dog-eared or not, all eternal and vivid. We do our best to make the good parts of our histories repeat, the stuff over which we think we have control.

Mere hours after the smiles of the father and son were recorded, they were dead. I review my mental notes. Self, I say, observe. Avoid enclosed places that can easily be turned into killing fields. Remind my daughter, when she heads to Paris this fall, to pay attention. To avoid the likely targets. I fantasize about locking her, and my other two, in closets until it stops.

Concerts. Nightclubs, Cafes. The pebbly shores of the French Riviera. All the world's edges. Every day people doing everyday things. I walked my dog just after I saw the news of mass murder in Nice, thought about how a lone man in a truck could destroy so much in so little time. I took note of the woman watering her front lawn, the boy on his skateboard, the elderly couple taking a walk. Memorable mundane moments, not all that different from the ones we see fit to capture on film -- when we are on a family vacation or simply existing somewhere else. We are neither ecstatically happy nor particularly sad. We just are, and we don't give much thought to our good fortune. The gift that is the ability to wake up every morning and just be, to do little more than repeat the ordinary  stuff that makes up our histories.

My mother texted just now, recalling how she and my father, almost thirty years ago, stood in the square of a small French town on Bastille Day, watching fireworks and listening to the national anthem. It was memorable, she said. Memorable, and, I assume, still as vivid as any picture in a shoe box or on a cell phone. Memorable, and vivid as the pictures of that father and his little boy. Beautiful smiles on a beautiful day on a beautiful beach. So ordinary, the stuff we repeat, if we're lucky.