Eulogy for A Noted Author & Gentleman of the South

This is not the time to recount our adventures and misadventures. We traveled together, toured together, and collaborated on projects that fell apart only to be replaced by others that would suffer the same fate. We agreed Los Angeles was a place where we could all too easily get into trouble. We talked of saying “later” when things got too crazy and repairing to the south of France for a season, provided we could find someone to front us the money. And we shared a love of jazz, the Blues, and W.C. Fields. Those memories aren’t going anywhere and can and will be recalled another day.

No, today, this miserable morning just 48 hours shy of Christmas, is time for serious thought.

Quixotic: extremely idealistic. Alternatively, unrealistic and impractical.

In an age when passions have been reduced to appetites, when eloquence is considered a character flaw, what hope did you have? And my arrival on the scene didn’t improve the odds.

After all, what’s one more madman? For surely that’s what we were. But unlike Don Quixote, we had no Dulcinea. There were others, of course, and we draped them in chivalric devotion. Songs, poems, offers of aid in times of distress, noble gestures all. But was there romance? Not really, nor true love. Not in the pure sense of either word.

No one will sing songs about us, my friend, my brother. And when we’re both gone who will see that our graves are kept clean? Dark will be the night, and no doubt cold will be the ground, as the old songs hold.

But I can see it now with the clarity granted a lone survivor near the end of Life’s trail of fading dreams and broken hearts: the windmills won, and always would.

You searched for purity in an impure world, and could never know peace.

But maybe now, my friend, my brother.

Dors maintenant, pauvre ange, en paix.