Everyone who was old enough to understand seems to remember where they were and what they were doing when JFK was shot. In my generation I thought the date we might remember would be the death of Princess Diana on the 31st of August 1997. I stepped off the train at Santa Maria Novella after a forty-eight hour on and off ride ride from Lisbon to Florence and I might have read about it initially from the screaming leaders of the international press being sold at the news agents in the station but I no longer remember. I do remember what I was wearing, I remember the weight of the luggage on my back and in my two arms and I remember being incredulous at the news. I will never forget where I was on the morning of Tuesday the 11th of September 2001.

A small group of us had gone to spend a few days with Joana at her family’s farm called “Passareiro”, just outside the village of Boa Fé, around twenty kilometres west of Évora. I think we were about five or six in all and the night before we had gone into Évora for dinner at a place called “Aquarius”. I remember a rowdy evening where we ate well, drank a fair amount and laughed a lot. Once back at the house we sat up sipping scotch and talking late into the night.

That morning was a late start for everyone and we congregated around the pool in dribs and drabs as people woke up, feeling a bit groggy and looking to soak off the edge of our hang-overs in the cool spring-water that feeds the tank. Someone got a text message from someone else to say that an airliner had crashed into one of the twin towers in New York and were we watching the news. We thought it was a silly, sick joke.  I was lying on one of the lounge chairs blinking behind my shades when a pair of Portuguese Air Force F-16s shrieked past, almost right above us, at very low level and with their after-burners on, flying in what I took to be the direction of Lisbon. More text messages came in from other people and at some point the coin began to drop for all of us. We sauntered off back up to the house and headed towards where the house-keepers lived as their’s was the only TV on the property. Squeezing in with them in their dining room, we watched the images and events unfold in silence. It was a day or two later that emails began to be circulated amongst us his friends regarding JJ; had anybody heard from him as he had been reported missing.

I don’t often dream with the departed but those times I do I usually understand I am being asked to think about something. It was a number of years later that JJ appeared to me in a lucid dream, at a time in my life when a number of things were very much up in the air and I had important decisions to make. In my dream I was on the terrace outside the staff room at St Julian’s and as I leant over that beautiful balustrade to look onto what we once knew as Mr Bull’s Garden… down there, at the bottom of the stairs, was JJ looking up at me… on crutches and wearing bright red pyjamas. 

“JJ? Dude… What are you doing here? I thought you were dead?”

“No. I’m ok. I was really hurt but I’m doing fine.”

“Ok…but what are you doing here?”

“ I’m here to see you.” He gave me a wink and I understood him to be saying to me “do the right thing”. Then he was gone.

Bless you.