This is the seventh anniversary of Spring Green, another one of my favorites, another story that revolves around France and sailing and that little marina in Paris. I wrote this story while in Wisconsin, attending a conference on, of all things, Frank Lloyd Wright, and in the tiny village of Spring Green.
His Taliesen East is located there, as is his School of Architecture. Most of the story vis-a-vis the WWII encounter in Dole comes from long talks with a friend of my fathers, a B pilot who was shot down in the region during the last year of the war, and who was taken in by partisans.
Call these people slow learners if you like. Slow, as in: it took me quite a while to figure out what was going on, and what it all meant. Hold the presses? Film at eleven? Not a chance. This kind of change is easy to miss because the process is so incremental โ change is small, slow, almost undetectable over a lifetime โ and it almost always happens out of sight. I want to paint a picture of an older man, a man getting on in years but not yet so withered and worn down by change that he has stopped wondering about time, and the meaning of it all.
Cool and grayish-blue, the whites clear, they feel distant in a way but the closer you get the more you feel a certain penetrating warmth: you feel a contentedness in his eyes, perhaps an echo of this in his easy smile. He stands behind a large mahogany desk; beyond him is a wall of glass and far below, the lights of a large city shimmer in golden glory. This man should be, in your eyes at least, the very picture of success.
He is Homo-Americanus and quite proud of the fact, and though he is but mortal flesh, in his own way he is unchanging, unyielding โ immortal. Any other change was trivial, mundane, something to be dealt with by associates down in the Minor Bullshit Department. That kind of change is unpredictable, and Charles Wentworth Addington, Jr. Spontaneous is combustion, often shocking, energetic and โ always messy. Very few do, especially men like Uncle Chuck. Change, like time, is a predator. Not even when men like Uncle Chuck get in the way, or protect the people they love from change.
