PARTING

Last night, a dear friend of mine who lives in Georgetown, or Washington, D.C., died. I dreamed of her departure before I received word that she had passed, and this morning when I opened two e-mails, I was not surprised by the news… just saddened.

Jane F. Bonin was an old friend who lived in New Iberia, Louisiana for many years, and we became acquainted during the time she taught English at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana. She was an early encourager of my poetry writing and once co-authored a graded reading list for Iberia Parish Schools with me. During the early seventies, we also co-authored a house journal entitled Epiphany Tidings, an Episcopal church newsletter, and served on the board of a kindergarten sponsored by The Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia.

Jane’s contributions to Drama at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were formidable ones — she wrote three books in this genre: Prize Winning Drama, Maria Fratti, and Major Themes in Prizewinning American Drama. She also received The Distinguished Professor Award, and when she retired from ULL and migrated to Washington, D.C. she distinguished herself on the staff of the Foreign Institute in the U.S. State Department.

But her sojourn in Malawi and Niger, Africa became her greatest life challenge, and she later wrote of it in The Color of a Lion’s Eye as a “six year drugless high with no social or legal consequences and no hangover. Nothing in my life has been as intense or as exciting as my time there…it was an overwhelming time from which I have not recovered and perhaps I don’t want to…” In Malawi she held the position of Associate Peace Corps Director; in Niger, she was appointed Peace Corps Country Director. Nineteen years passed before Jane produced a book about her experiences (2015): “…disparate threads of my six years serving those who serve in that place of astonishing and terrible beauty…”

This morning I hear her voice clearly in the words: “If I were in Africa we would sit on a mat under a tree and tell our stories one to the other. I hope this remembrance will be the next best thing.” Jane was a consummate raconteur, and the voice in the stories about Africa was at times witty; at others, poignant with sadness over “rotting flesh, maggoty wounds, glittering feverish eyes, grotesquely twisted limbs, cleft palates, and amputations,” but strong as she followed a leitmotif she lived by: “Serve those who serve.” During her darker moments in Africa she wrote that “‘the force that drives the green fuse,’ as Dylan Thomas called the life force, drives harder in Africa and creates both life and death with ever more velocity.”

Her book of twenty-four vignettes has circulated around Georgetown and Washington, D.C. and has found an attentive and appreciative audience — only a few months before her death, she read excerpts to members of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, hoping to inspire them with the desire to serve some charitable mission. Two months before her death, Jane made a last trek to France, which she loved, and in her spare time, she kept up her French lessons. At times, she sang in a large chorale in Washington. She loved music, language, art (Jane was once a docent in an art gallery), theatre – all cultural pursuits. She could also tell a bawdy joke, lift a glass, and prepare a gourmet meal for her friends.

Jane’s “tribe” of friends was large and diverse, and she was among those who advocate “nothing human is alien to me.” She embraced the disenfranchised, as well as those who moved in the circles of advanced culture. Back in the 70’s and 80’s I had the privilege of working with her in the Hunger Project. Our job was to raise both money and the consciousness of people about the seriousness of hunger in the world. At that time I was an executive director of a Girl Scout Council, and we staged a large event in Lafayette, Louisiana, using all we had learned in an old self-actualization organization, EST, about “intention” to end hunger. We spoke to a packed crowd. Jane went on to utilize her experiences in her role as a Peace Corps Director, and I later became an ordained deacon and Director of an outreach mission.

Through the years I never lost touch with this charming woman who, like most humans, had many faces and many talents. I last saw her this past year when she visited her daughter, Knowles Harper, at Sewanee, Tennessee. Somehow I knew it was a farewell visit because she seemed to be slipping away, although she hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer at that time. I told her we would visit again, and she said to me, “Any time you want me to meet you in some vacation place, I’m game.” She was always game for an adventure, but I didn’t follow through. I wish I had, and we could have gone to a prize place on my bucket list – the isle of Iona, a thin place where miracles happen. The next best thing I could do for her was to put her on the prayer list in another thin place, St. Mary’s Convent here at Sewanee – and, actually, the Order of St. Mary here has a sister Order in Malawi.

Of farewells, Emily Dickinson said it best: “Parting is all we know of heaven…and all we need of hell.” I’ll miss you, chere amie, but I also know you’re going to help them “pass a good time” and keep to their good intentions in the other world. As I once said in a homily for another old friend, and I don’t remember the source (readers of this tribute should know that the lines below aren’t original with me). The thoughts were taken from an article that describes spiritual movement in our lives: “the good and the affection we share with one another is eternal. They don’t start with us, and they don’t end with us. They come from and point toward God, toward love. No love we ever bestow on those who we care about is ever lost. It goes with them to God’s home and it stays with us. The love that goes deeper and reaches beyond material existence into the realms of spirit is the love that overcomes death because it comes from God, divine love.”  

THE COLOR OF A LION'S EYE

Back in the 80's I worked with Jane Bonin, then an English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in a project called The Hunger Project and was inspired by her dedication to helping end world hunger. She definitely had a calling to make life better for poor, disenfranchised people throughout the world, so a few years later I wasn't surprised when she retired from her position at the University, packed her belongings, and went off to Washington, D.C. to work on the staff of the Foreign Service Institute in the U.S. State Department. Ultimately, she accepted a position on the Peace Corps staff and was sent to Africa. During the two years she spent in Malawi as an Associate Peace Corps Director and the four years she worked as a Country Director in Niger, she came to love Africa and its people and began recording her experiences about her life there.

During Jane's sojourn, I kept in touch with her but didn't know that she had been writing about her experiences in Africa until she returned and revealed her writings to me during several visits I made to Washington. In 2002, Jane allowed me to read some of the vignettes she had written about Africa, and I recognized that the material was highly publishable. They were reflective of Jane's heightened awareness of her surroundings and her ability to document meaningful experiences. However, she tucked the writing away until this year when she decided to publish these personal, poignant sketches about the people and culture of Malawi, as well as several vignettes about Niger in a book entitled The Color of A Lion's Eye.

Border Press Books will launch the book this month, and readers will be delighted with a wonderful collection of vignettes that I think are reminiscent of the description and characterizations in essays by D. H. Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico and the people and landscapes depicted in Alexander McCall Smith's novels set in Botswana.

Jane prefaces her book with a charming introduction, setting the tone for the vignettes that follow. She writes, "if we were in Africa we would sit on a mat under a tree and tell our stories one to the other. I hope this remembrance will be the next best thing." In the twenty-four vignettes that follow, the reader will be treated to stories that range from an account about Jane's family origins and her kin's desire to serve others to a final essay about her encounter with a lion in Le Jardin Zoologique in Niger, a country among the poorest in Africa.

The essay about Jane's arrival in Malawi as a Programming and Training Officer is this cogent recollection:

"a country burning down...billowing smoke, tongues of flame, and the blackened scorched earth [making] it appear that the whole countryside was on fire...I later learned that Malawians have a practice of burning off the stubble from their fields in preparation for the next planting of corn. The sugarcane farmers do the same thing in Louisiana, but I remember it as a more controlled exercise..."

Detailed descriptions of landscapes, weather, and experiences in an African beauty parlor, highlighted by amusing personal encounters are recorded in a style that reflects Jane's burgeoning worldview. In a visit to Zimbabwe, she treks through a rainforest with waist-high brown grass that reminds her of Hemingway novels and takes the reader into what she describes as the hot and dusty "real" Africa. However, intruders who steal a generator provided by the Peace Corps for her use during power outages remind her that thievery is sometimes part of everyday life in the Third World.

Weston, Jane's cook and house worker, becomes a strong figure in her life in Malawi, and her reminiscences about him are particularly poignant in an essay about six pigeons she adopts and for which Weston builds a pigeon house and becomes the caretaker. Jane writes:

"The pigeons captured the essence of brief periods of repose at day's end. Their soaring flight home every evening meant that I was home too. I had made a home of a rented house, tacky government-issue furniture, a flock of village pigeons, and a servant and his family. The sense of being at home that I felt during those evenings on the khande was an unexpected blessing. I never experienced it again in Africa..."

On one occasion Jane was sent to Le Jardin Zoologique in Niger to determine if a zoo was a "sustainable" project in this part of the world and was asked to touch a lion after it had been shot with a dart gun. Inside the lion's cage, she looked into the animal's eyes where she saw:

"a pure, cold green, the color of the inside of a kiwi. I was seized by the moment and could not take my eyes away. My memory, uninvited, supplied an image—"From Greenland's Icy Mountains," a line I learned as a child from a pompous and condescending Anglican mission hymn I had not thought of in decades...that color, which I can still recall, came to stand for the mystery of Africa and the mystery of my life that had brought me to this beautiful and terrible place..."

This essay is the concluding essay in The Color of A Lion's Eye and leaves the reader with a sense of Jane's earnestness and nostalgic feeling for a country she grew to love.

   

These vignettes give readers a sense of immediacy and reality, are filled with the tastes, smells, sounds, and concrete language of an expert personal narrator and possess an emotional dimension that places it as a tour de force in contemporary travel literature.

We have waited a long time to see these vignettes in print, but the wait has been worth it. Brava, Jane, and don't make us wait so long for the encore!

Available from Amazon or Border Press Books, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 (borderpress@gmail.com). The cost for purchasing from Border Press is $15 plus $4.95 for shipping and handling in the U.S.

AMONG GEORGETOWN'S GREATS

Georgetown is a charming area in northwest Washington, D.C. that gives the word "diversity" full meaning. Its unique architecture includes old stone houses, Georgian brick residences, and early Federal and Classic Revival homes interspersed with numerous attractive row houses. I'd define the cuisine in Georgetown as "global," ranging from Belgian and Asian dishes to classy French menus offered at numerous excellent eating places. The population includes Salvadorans, Asians, Hawaiians, African Americans, and many other ethnic groups who add to the colorful diversity of the area.

Among those notables who live in Georgetown and contribute to its diversity are two of my favorite friends, Jane Bonin and Fred (Freddie) Begun. We lunched with them this week at the Raku Restaurant on Q Street in Georgetown. The previous evening at Jane's apartment on Q Street, Freddie had read aloud an entire food review in the Washington Post, interjecting wry remarks about the touted menu items and the elite prose describing those items. He was doing one of his favorite activities – performing!

Fred Begun, master
timpani performer

For 48 years, Freddie performed as the major timpanist of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. under the batons of some of the greats in the music world: Copland, Rostropovich, Stravinsky, Slatkin… and his performances often equaled the dramatic renditions of these renowned conductors, especially the performances of the ultimate conductor (who was Freddie's favorite), Leonard Bernstein.

"I was noted for my 'balletic style'," Freddie said, explaining that he often leaped about while playing the timpani. He executed this style while premiering five timpani concerti and while touring the world to perform in such places as the former Soviet Union where he played in a historic series of musical performances.

This Spring, George Mason University, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the School of Music presented a Percussion Celebration to honor the "Extraordinary Musical Career of Fred Begun." The University has established Fred Begun Percussion Scholarships and given the percussion studio at George Mason his name. In appreciation, Freddie donated to the George Mason Fenwick Library his entire library of timpani parts and scores, many of which are autographed by famous conductors and composers and containing Freddie's original markings. Freddie also made a personal financial contribution to help maintain the collection.

Freddie Begun began studying percussion instruments when he was 11, playing the snare drum throughout high school, then entered Juilliard School from which he graduated. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland and mentored many distinguished timpanists who're performing in the music world today. He also authored 21 Etudes for Timpani, pieces designed to teach students how to enhance their technical and musical skills. "Some of the musicians today are technically proficient," Freddie said, "but they aren't actually involved with the passion of music. This seems to happen because some of their teachers feel that way. They think the older generation is too schmaltzy."

Nowadays, Freddie continues to mentor timpanists and has just completed his manuscript entitled Playing Outside the Box, a memoir devoted to reminiscences about playing beyond the written score – "performances for which I was infamous," he said.

Freddie and Jane at Raku's
in Georgetown

Freddie's companion, Jane Bonin, is a long-time friend of ours, a former professor in the English Department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she was honored as Distinguished Professor during her tenure there.

Jane was one of the founders of the Eavesdrop Theatre in Lafayette and "Open Space," a showcase for student playwrights. She authored a play produced Off-Off Broadway and wrote a definitive biography of playwright Mario Fratti, as well as Prize Winning American Drama and Major Themes in Prize Winning American Drama. Jane and Freddie share a love of drama and music, and Jane studied voice in Washington for years after returning stateside from Africa.

She's now working on a memoir of Africa, excerpts of which have appeared in her blog entitled "The Color of a Lion's Eye." She served two stints with the Peace Corps – as a Country Director in Niger and as a Deputy Director in Malawi. "I'm proud of my work there," she said. "Hilary Clinton just today singled out the Peace Corps as having the model program that will heal HIV-AIDS. One third of the population was infected with this disease when I was there. I loved Africa, but it was my first experience with extreme poverty, and it was overwhelming to someone who had formerly been a cloistered academician." During the 80's, Jane actively promoted The Hunger Project, a global organization committed to the end of world hunger.

Both Freddie and Jane deprecatingly refer to themselves as less than notable, but we think they're two of our most interesting and attractive friends who have contributed to the Washington/Georgetown community and to the world at large. We left them reluctantly, via the notorious I-95 before traffic began to snarl, to return to Williamsburg, VA where we're vacationing, but we're still talking about the wonderful visit with these two notables and plan to return for another celebration of our friendship next year.