When our fondness and friendship began to turn into something, well, else. . . .

I looked him up on the internets. The picture below at The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was the first I found. He, when he saw it, was not that fond of it, but there was for me something powerful and very loving about it. It reminded me of something I couldn't quite get a handle on at the time. Later in the winter I did: it was the Lion from Narnia. I'd been trying to get the Chronicles for my grandbabies the previous Christmas via Ebay, and had been looking at that picture quite a lot.

He had an intimate connection with that Lion. . . . He'd played C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands, and as for every role he played did deep research on Lewis. In fact, our first off-blog communication was on the subject of a one-man piece he wanted to write and perform on Lewis's four concepts of love. . . .