ThisFrench bulldog in a tutu ought to be explained: my father had one as a very young child, and it too wore a tutu. I think it was somehow connected with my father’s survival of meningitis as a young child. My son now sleeps with this one (my dad’s old one is long gone), which was given to Grandaddio on his retirement by colleagues who were especially amused by a picture of my father as a child with his stuffed bulldog on a tutu. As for this tutu here, its most common function currently is as a wig for JP.

This watercolor is of a WWI Balon: my grandfather, Paul’s father, served as an Arostier, a “balloon man,” with the man who painted this.

The scarf and bonnet were woven by my father at the age of 13 in 1939 for his mother and father.

This watercolor by my father shows the front gate and windows of4 Quai d’Anjou, a one bedroom apartment my father and mother owned on the Ile-St. Louis in the center of Paris. My aunt lives in that building too, and my father and his two brothers grew up about 5 blocks away.

Scouting played a big part in my father’s young life. This picture is of him and his brother Pierre. Pierre was my father’s protector in school: when his older brother Pierre first went to school, my father would copy all his homework and beg and beg and beg to be allowed to go to school too. Finally, my grandparents relented: he was put in the same grade as his older brother. Pierre proudly tells me about how Paul always got better grades, but Pierre always protected Paul from the older kids. The Scouts banner shows some of my father’s scouting achievements and also my father’s totem, the wise weasel. When my father and mother went to Paris, they stayed in an apartment at 25 Boulevard Pasteur (two pictures show the view from the balcony). My father bought the apartment from his best friend Georges Bigotte, my “uncle George,” who cannot fly any more and so Skyped once a week with my father. While staying at 25 Boulevard Pasteur, they would visit and be visited by many of my father’s scouting buddies and their friends. We jokingly called them “Les Scouts.”

The metal-clad notepad and compass and loupe were in a drawer in my father’s room. They aren’t worth anything, really, but they symbolize what he did: rockpicking and record keeping. The fact that he kept them for many many years after he stopped using them and even through massive downsizing of possessions says that he valued them. He once told me that all told, he figured that he had lived in a tent for well over 3 years total when he was a young geologist in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the Iron Range of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minnesota and Wisconsin are where he went loony: he always had a real love of those awkward birds. On his camping trips, he would go out loaded with food and come back weeks later loaded with rocks. My mother was the office manager where he worked: she managed the supplies for the geologists and the secretaries in the office.

Thisbelt buckle is meant to be symbolic of my father’s love of the West and his adoption of certain elements of western garb: he loved bolo ties and silver Navajo belt buckles. This one, however, is cast from silver mined out of the Candelaria project in Nevada, which my father helped develop.

This textbook is one that my father helped produce: as I understand it, he read through and suggested changes here and there. He was devoted to science education, particularly about minerals and mining. He told me many times of every physical thing I ever used that “If it’s not grown, it’s mined.” He thought people should know about that and make fully conscious decisions about how to manage human’s interface with and use of and care for the earth.

Each pin on this map represents a place where either Leslyn, Jacques, or Grandaddio have traveled. All but the yellow and red ones are places Grandaddio traveled. Isidora and Jean-Pierre had fun putting all these pins into the map.

What can I say? Nothing is adequate to express how much I miss my father or what he meant to me. I’d like to move on to some things our family, including my brother Philip, who could not be here today, is thankful for:

  • Paul’s friends here who made living in Butternut and Linden socially joyful and rewarding. The memoir writing group. The watercolor group. The Coterie. You welcomed and befriended him.
  • The helpful suggestions and emotional support surrounding issues of his handicaps and needs made by Barbara Madden, Beal Hyde, and Joan Madison were always particularly in evidence to me and my family, but I know well there were many others.
  • The excellent care provided by the staff, from those who build and repair to those who cook to those who administer, but especially those who provided day-to-day care and whom my father leaned on heavily and were always there for him. The entire staff of Wake Robin has been excellent.
  • Bonnie Heaslip, who helped my father with paperwork when he could no longer physically do it and thus gave him an extended measure of independence.
  • The move to Wake Robin has been the greatest gift my father ever gave me or my family. Without that, his grandchildren would not really know him well.
  • Speaking of that, it was also a gift for my father that he died before any of his children or grandchildren did.
  • And perhaps at the center of all of these things to be thankful for is my father’s quiet, graceful, forceful, intelligent, and kind personality, which made it oh so much easier to befriend, care for, and love him.

When he moved to Vermont, I was developing a course about ancient stoicism. Ever the intellectually curious, he bought a few books, several in French, about Stoicism. After reading them, he decided that he was a stoic. That was, I think, because he believed, among other things, that death is the end, full stop, and that what humans should do on earth is threefold:

  • Develop their own abilities and use them to the utmost, particularly the capacity to think and manage and analyze one’s activities and life. Which leads to the second item: what should they be used for?
  • To deal with whatever life hands you in terms of both those desires and impulses that come from within, such as a passion for geology, watercolor, and mentoring, but also whatever life hands you from without, such as a good education, this or that amount of wealth, and even Amyelotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. All those things, both from within and from without, are opportunities to show what you are made of. Your virtue is shown by how you manage what you are given as inner and outer resources and challenges.
  • But that deals only with one’s self. The third item is another use to which one can put one’s abilities: to Develop and nurture friends and family in a particular way: we have an altruistic part of us that drives us to help others. It is just given to most of us. If you conceive of one’s relation to fellow humans as ever-widening circles, with one’s self at the center followed by closest friends, family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, fellow citizens, fellow humans, one notices that most people treat each level differently, with a different, lesser, level of concern and willingness to help and nurture and support the outer rings. The stoic idea is to collapse those concentric rings so that one treats each wider more distant circle as if it were a closer circle. In this way, one becomes, ideally, a citizen of the world with a concern for all of humanity. In his own way, as a business man whose beliefs leaned rightward, my father practiced this: as a geologist, he always looked at the long term rather than what might help in the short term but harm in the long term. I’ve printed out letters of a few of his colleagues: the refrain is that my father was an excellent mentor and the best boss ever. that’s one way he practiced his altruism. Another way he practiced it was in His charity giving, which was always anonymous, but also extensive. Even while he strove to avoid taxes strenuously, he gave a great deal to educational causes such as the Mineral Information Institute, Havern School, and a school on an indian reservation to which my father loyally gave every year, as well as the arts. Yet another way was in his striving to share what he thought important and what he discovered: he published 26 papers, served on countless committees, and was elected president of two national societies for his service to his profession. And then there is what my brother and I call the “clipping service.” For all of my adult life, and even now via the many books and articles he left behind, I received a constant flow of articles and books, sometimes more than one a day. I gradually discovered, that he did the same thing for or to cousins, colleagues, friends, etc. He always wanted to share and help others develop themselves.

In the end, I can’t help but feel that my father’s life stands as a wonderful monument to what human flourishing can be: he achieved a great deal, inspired incredible loyalty, admiration, and thankfulness in all who worked with him, was a big strong part of a large and loving family who are now feeling his absence so keenly, and he had a peaceful death that he courageously foresaw and planned for well. We should all be so virtuous and lucky.