I wrote in my recent LETTER FROM ANTIBES about heading to the South of France and the Cannes Film Festival to write a cover story on Sylvester Stallone for Vanity Fair back in 1990. I have always been a meditative walker, a flâneur focused on mindfulness as much as fitness. During an idle day back then in Cannes, I was mindfully averting my gaze from posters of movie idols and letting the light and the Mediterranean demand its attention there along La Croisette when I spotted Roger Ebert outside the Hotel Splendid where he always stayed. I introduced myself and he invited me to have a café au lait and a Perrier and a croissant with him. We liked each other and decided to meet again at the same table at the same little restaurant the next day and again we both ordered a café au lait and a Perrier and a croissant. I confessed to him I loved routine as much as he did, and he then filled me in on all the routines and rituals of the place and how to navigate them all. He could not have been kinder to me or more generous in his advice or with his enthusiasms and even a few warnings.
It was only later in my own years of recovery that I realized that Roger had gotten sober himself through AA and I think a large part of his generosity toward me back during that time was perhaps based on the way he'd learned to live his life in that fellowship. I'll always remember his simple acts of kindness toward me that week since I was feeling so out-of-place and a bit lost. I'm sure he sensed it as an older, more seasoned writer and journalist, and as person in recovery. He was being sympathetic and thoughtful instead of glib and cynical. There was, yes, a mindfulness about him.
You never know when the simplest acts of kindness will stay with someone. Roger Ebert’s kindness has always stayed with me. And as I remember this kind man, I try to remember to replicate his kindness - and the kindness of so many others - in my own life when reaching out to people who seem a bit lost. It's much easier to offer them a bit of kindness instead of being glibly inconsiderate and impatient with them in their lostness. I don't always succeed. But I'm getting better at it. I have come to believe that none of us finally is specifically kind, only our acts displaying it are. I think kindness exists as a force all its own. We can choose to channel it in our lives, or not. We replicate it in human form by showing it to others who then replicate their versions of it in their own lives. I often say and write: Everything connects. Each act of kindness is a connection to another one, ad infinitum; acts of kindness create a connective tissue going back to the source of it. We are its mycelia.
On my second visit with Roger, he brought along a copy of his book, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, A Cannes Notebook, for which he also did the drawings. He signed it to me after our croissants and conversation, patted me on the back, and was on his way to his next screening. I like to think of this deeply kind man - he died in 2013 - that way still: on his way forever to his next screening and his next act of kindness to a lost soul. Or maybe he has become a part of kindness itself.
Here is an excerpt from his book he gave me as a gift that day, along with the gift of a more mindful way to look at kindness. Roger wrote:
“Saturday morning. Awake at 6 a.m., couldn't sleep any later. Outside the hotel, in the square where the old men play boules on Sunday afternoons, the vendors were setting up their stands for the flower market. Along the rue Felix-Faure, there are four or five seafood restaurants, all in a row, and in front of them, waiting for the garbage men, were large canvas sacks filled with sawdust and oyster shells. I walked past them in the cool morning air, treading lightly in my Reeboks, playing that game where you intensify the moment by saying to yourself that you are alive and this is happening and here you are.
“Rituals are important to me, especially important when I travel. It is necessary for me to walk just this way on Saturday morning, to turn here and go in a block, up to the pedestrian shopping street, and then turn again and walk past the early-morning stores, the butchers, and the greengrocers. At the end of the street, I must turn uphill, to the Cannes marketplace, where the new asparagus and strawberries are thrown in profusion across the stalls, as if farmers had no idea what to do with the bounty. At the little newsstand on the other side of the market, I must buy the Herald-Tribune. I am always the first to ask for it, and the old woman inside the kiosk always has to unsnap the wire around the bundle, and she always has trouble finding her pliers, and this is important, too. Then I walk back down by the bus stop near the old harbor, and double backdown Felix-Faure to the same table in the same cafe as yesterday morning, and as last year. I order café au lait and Perrier, and the waiter puts a basket of croissants on the table. Some mornings it is raining, and those mornings are the best, because if you can sit in an outdoor cafe, under the awning, just inches from the rain, and drink café au lait, you can recapture, I am convinced, the ancient feeling of the cave, of being safe and warm while it is cold outside. Cats will sit for hours in a window and look complacently at the rain inches from their nose.
“You can see that my mind was still wandering with the delirium of jet lag. I looked through the Herald-Tribune, the paper in which more central European intellectuals die than any other, and had two cups of coffee. Then I took out my sketchbook and my drawing pen, and tried to make a picture of the stubby trees. I have only been drawing for two years and I am not very satisfied with my work at this point, but the idea behind the drawing was what's important: the idea that I sat in this place and drew those trees ...”
There’s great strength in kindness.
I learned kindness from that same program, and I’ve come to live routine as well. Neither were part of my repertoire before my new life began.