Normandy in 1997

For me it was a big year, in many ways, 1997 was. I had been working for Apple (Claris) since January 1992. Back then, every five years we Apple employees had the right to take a six-week "sabbatical leave" — paid leave, of course. I also had four weeks of vacation time saved up, so my sabbatical was actually ten weeks long. I decided to go spend a month in France. Walt came over for the first two weeks, but then he had to go back to work in California. My mother and my 15-year-old niece came to France to stay with me for the second half of the month.

My mother, my niece, and I then spent about a week seeing the sights in Paris before going up to Rouen to visit friends there. My mother wanted to see the D-Day beaches, and we did that, among many other things. My niece took this picture of my mother and me with my friends Henri and Jeanine on the day we visited the spectacular ruins of the ancient Jumièges abbey on the Seine between Rouen and Le Havre.

My mother was 67 years old in 1997. She passed away a year ago this month. She would have turned 89 next week, but it wasn't to be. She's of course much on my mind these days. She came to Saint-Aignan twice, in 2004 and again in 2005, before she decided she couldn't travel like that any more.

During that month in France, I decided that I was going to resign from Apple at the end of 1997. Walt and I had bought a house in San Francisco, and the commute to Silicon Valley was killing me. My 50th birthday was on the horizon.

With J. and H., my mother, niece, and I also went to other spots along the Normandy coast. The photo on the left shows my mother, Jeanine, and me at Saint-Valery-en Caux, near Dieppe. We had gone on a day trip to see the English Channel cliffs.

I got to be friends with Jeanine when I spent a year in Rouen in 1972-73. Her son was a student at the lycée where I was working. She and her family — she had two other children, who were younger —had moved to Rouen only a few years earlier, and she didn't have a lot of friends there yet. Jeanine was born in 1934, so she would be 85 years old now, if she's still living. We lost touch about 15 years ago, I'm sorry to say.

Here's a shot of my mother and me with Jeanine's close friend Henri. I knew him for only a few years. He was born in 1924, so I feel pretty sure that he must have passed away by now.

I remember that the day we went to the D-Day beaches, my mother and Henri were both in tears. My mother was busy looking for the names of men from North Carolina who had died on the Normandy coast on D-Day.

That day, Henri told me about his wartime experience. He was a young man, and somehow he ended up in London as a member of the French army units accompanying General de Gaulle.

A while later, when de Gaulle and his troops returned to France, Henri passed through Le Havre on his way to Rouen. He shed tears as he described the scene. All Le Havre was in ruins because, as an important port city, it had been heavily bombarded. Henri said that as he and the troops marched through the city, people emerged from their basements and cellars bearing gifts of food and drink for the soldiers. He thought it was amazing they could be so generous after all they had suffered through during the war.

All of that trip in 1997 was memorable. Walt and I went to both the men's and women's finals at the French Open. I had rented an apartment not far from the Eiffel Tower and the rue Cler market street for the month-long stay. We enjoyed spending time in Paris again. Maybe it was that experience, more than any other single event, that led to our coming to live in France in 2003. I had thought that California and San Francisco might be places where I would love to live more even than in France and Paris, but it didn't work out that way. My last few Silicon Valley jobs were less satisfying than the years I spent working for Apple. The thrill was gone.

Walt and I had met and become friends in France in the early 1980s. By 2002, after coming to France from California for vacations every year since 1988, we knew we were ready to come and live here. I can't believe it's been nearly 16 years already.


Here are Jeanine and Henri in Dieppe in 1997.