In 1966 we moved a thousand miles, to a place where we didn't know anyone. And though we quickly made friends, we had no other family here. So one Thanksgiving, in 1970 or '71, there were only the five of us for dinner. I thought it might be fun to eat out, have the Thanksgiving special at Numero Uno's. Then Eli got sick, and we had the meal delivered. We sat there depressed in our dining room and tried to eat turkey that tasted as if it came out of a can. Boy, did we have leftovers! They went into the garbage instead of the refrigerator.
That lonely Thanksgiving certainly stands out as a contrast to all our Thanksgivings since then. For we've been having potlucks, including on Thanksgiving, with the Leplaes for years. We first met them when we happened to eat at the same table at the Folk Fair about 35 years ago. Not long afterwards we were amazed to meet again over food, at a potluck for Atwater School second graders and their families at the Shorewood Women's Club. It seemed the Leplaes, with their five children, and the Rosenblatts, with their three children, were destined to eat together.
Our families have grown with marriages and grandchildren, and shrunk with the loss of Luc Leplae in June, 2000. Luc was a man who truly led two lives. In his first life, he was a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In his second life he was a cartoonist. In both lives he was a unique personality. And since we're all thankful to have known him, I thought for my Thanksgiving blog I'd include a somewhat condensed version of the eulogy I gave at his funeral six years ago:
I suspect Luc really appreciated yesterday's visitation, the warmth of the crowd, the laughter, the occasional tears, more like a party than a funeral. Laughter was his specialty, tears weren't, but I doubt that he minded them. After all, he had a caring relationship with many of us. We'll miss his warmth, his playfulness, his generosity, his humor, and you have to cry when you lose someone with those qualities.
He was part of my everyday life, so I'll miss him every day. When I check my Email, I'll know I won't be receiving any more jokes from him. He filtered them well, sent only the funny ones. Once he let a gross one slip through and said to me afterwards, slightly amused, "I think I made a mistake."
I'll miss him when I glance down the alley next to the Leplaes and know we won't be doing tai chi there every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Luc studied the videotapes and learned the tai chi forms before everyone else did, then helped those who hadn't learned it.
I'll miss him when I pass the bike racks at Schwartz on Oakland or Stone Creek Coffee and know I won't see Luc's three-wheeler. Like me, he was a biker and a cafe writer. He tooled around, seat close to the ground because he couldn't risk falling.
I'll miss him when my computer spirals out of control. He initiated many of us into the mysterious world of the internet and Email, taught me how to use my scanner, to set up a web page, send mass Emails. Whenever he found a fresh bit of computer info, he'd pass it on to me. And he'd sit at my computer for hours if I needed a trouble-shooter.
Everything I've mentioned is part of Luc's second life, and I haven't even mentioned his
comics. Nor his close family. That was important in both lives.
The first time I said good-bye forever to Luc was in 1992. But by some miracle, he survived. It wasn't his best year. He tinkered around, built a model solar-powered car, was determined not to die, yet wasn't sure what he wanted to do with whatever time he had left.
In January 1993, Luc was given a new liver and a new life. I brought him a drawing pad and craypas while he was still in the hospital. I don't know if he ever used them. He definitely did start drawing, quickly found his own style and voice, became a cartoonist, and spent his second life showing the rest of us, through delightful drawings and words, the high and low points of his first life, in Europe during the Second World War, in China, in Shorewood, in his post-operative coma, always, always, with humor and playfulness.
I loved that playfulness and humor. The Rosenblatts and Leplaes have spent hundreds of evenings playing charades, writing group stories, drawing group drawings, playing dictionary, making up our own games, or just sitting around talking and laughing uproariously. Luc was always at the center. He thrived on all this. He tended to be the instigator. I'm pretty sure our alphabet dinners were his creation. We had weekly potlucks and one night Luc said that every dish we bring had to begin with the letter A. The following potluck everything began with the letter B. When we came to X, everything had to be X-rated. We ran through the alphabet almost two times.
Luc had the mind of a scientist, always curious, always anxious to get to the bottom of things, always ready to meet a
