"What shall I bring you from Paris?", he had asked. I didn't even have to think about that one. "Something from the Earth," I said. "A twig, a leaf, a rock ... something from the Earth."

That was three weeks ago. Tonight he sits beside me on the couch, a faraway look in his eye, serving up his treasures. There is a poster from Tournee du Chat Noir that he snitched from somewhere along le Rive Gauche. It is a fine poster featuring a truly cool black cat with the most enormous gold eyes. "Look, mon petit Pussois," I say to my long-time companion, now curled in a ball on top of his jacket, "it is a picture of you!" I think she twitched a whisker but I could have been mistaken.

He pulls the next offering from his bag. It's a Metro ticket he purchased to travel to Le Pere Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetary where Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan and other notables are buried. There is also a map of Le Pere Lachaise, the very one he carried as he found his way around the grounds. I can see him so easily in my mind's eye, long brown tresses flowing from beneath the jaunty beret, heavy black overcoat flapping in the winter wind, the dark goatee, looking very French. Oui, oui. I am not surprised that he was stopped by tourists at every turn, asking, "Do you speak English?"

Who woulda thunk it ... Lightnin' Lewie Brasket performing live and in person nightly on the Champs Elysees? Certainly not him. Not in his wildest dreams. But sometimes even our wildest dreams come true, and the thought that it had actually happened for him is something he is still trying to come to grips with, after the fact, as if it is only a dream from which he might wake at any moment. As he speaks, relaying his adventures, visions of Lightnin' in Paris become more and more vivid in my mind. They draw breath and speak to me, sprout wings and soar through the ether searching for a place to manifest.

He talks of Julie and Michelle and Philippe, his newfound friends from across the water. He talks of the teaming masses filling the Champs Elysees on New Year's Eve, every last one of them carrying an open bottle of champagne, reveling in the passage of Time. He laughs, his eyes sparkle, he wistfully muses about running away to Paris to live the life of the artiste, all the while his mind churning on the wife and the child and the child-to-be. He felt at home in Paris, he says. At last, the hapless puzzle piece embraces its missing niche. A niche now so remote in retrospect, so unattainable, so gossamer in its substance. Ah, c'est la vie; au pays des aveugles les borgnes sont rois.

And now, s'il vous plait, le piece de resistance! From the cymbal bag he draws forth his final tribute. It is wrapped in two plastic bags which he very carefully and methodically removes, revealing a pair of white cotton socks rolled into a ball. "It was the only way I knew to bring this back through Customs," he says, anticipating the question in my eyes. He unrolls one of the socks, holds it upside down over a piece of paper, and gently taps it with his finger. Tiny bits of soil and rock patter onto the paper. "Something from the Earth," he says proudly. "Little pieces of the Earth, as a matter of fact, from the area surrounding Chopin's grave." He knows, indeed, the surest route to my heart.

My face is alight with joy. I kiss him soundly. He hugs me tight. "I must have walked a hundred miles over there," he says. "And I thought of you for many a step, wishing you could have been there to see it with me." Then together we move the precious cargo from the paper into a crystal dish where it shall remain for posterity, or until someone sorting my apartment after my death thinks, "Huh, dirt in a dish," and wipes it clean.

"Bon soir", I say as he departs for home and family. "Bon soir and merci, mon ami."