Joy in its pure form

He was like the sun. He shone the light on you wherever you were. Sometimes he would go away, though. But we all go away sometimes, don’t we? There was something so vibrant about him. The way he smiled with his eyes and the way he laughed with his heart. The way he was curious about the past and the way he thought the future wasn’t meant for him. The way he was excited about being alive and the way he was reconciled with death. 

He met her once. Death. I think it is because he wasn’t afraid like most of us are. So she told him: “Come, I will show you. It is not that scary, you are right.” He went with her and then he came back. For a swift moment, but he was back. I remember the look in his eyes when he got out of the hospital. I knew he had met her. They talked. He was confused and at the same time, he knew everything he needed to know.

He needed time to come back, I could see it. It was a bumpy road, I would reckon, but he found something positive in it, he was talented for that. He was talented for life in general. He was joy in its pure form, really. 

He was thinking to himself, she visited, obviously, she thought I was irresistible. And he was. When you know someone special you tend to get used to this incredible energy like it was something that happened to people every day. Seeing how other people reacted to him reminded me: “Oh, but this doesn’t happen every day.” This happens when you meet him. A charming archeologist born in 1947 in a country that has changed its name 11 times since then. 

An archeologist who wanted to be a veterinarian because he was aware of the value of life. But, then he understood he needed a bit more than that to be a vet. So he thought to himself, go to Law school while you figure out what you really want, you don’t want your parents to bring you back home because you are not a student anymore. Law was never in his scope of interest really.  I mean he was fine with it, but he was not excited about it. Then he had an epiphany: He was excited about the past. Not history, that was too unreliable. Archeology, that was empirical. And it meant being out in the open a good part of the year, digging out people who were excited about their thing centuries ago. Maybe this is how he got accustomed to death, he was a distant witness of it every day. 

He liked to sing. I cannot say he didn’t have a talent for it, he did. He was so cute when he sang that it made me think it was something he would have liked to do if he wasn’t an archeologist. There was music in his heart.

He walked everywhere with a cane even before he needed it. It is a cane that had belonged to his grandpa, with a special design on it. He liked the idea of himself with a cane. He wasn’t too concerned about how it made him look – he liked the idea so much that it became a part of his image. 

He was always adding a decade to his years and we always made fun of him for that. For an archeologist a decade is nothing, he used to say. 

I would give anything for a decade more with him.