Hi, loves. ❤️

Remembering André

This weekend, André Pozner, the man I affectionately but jokingly called my Godfather, died at age 82. The Godfather part was a joke because he wasn’t the least bit religious — in fact, I’m quite sure he hated religion; questioned it and poked at it lovingly the way he did most people and things. I just never found any other satisfactory way to refer to him — not as an uncle, not as a father, but often as close as either. Our families have been wedded together for three generations and across two continents, beginning in Hollywood in the 1940s.

Below is a piece I wrote back in 2021, about the summer I spent with him in Paris that saved my life, in very large part to him. There’s so much more I could say, but this is a place to start: his extreme, exuberant caretaking. I will miss him forever.

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He’d been cooking for me all summer in that Parisian flat. Meat, mostly, accompanied by wine, always wine, drunk late into the night. We’d eat on his timetable, close to 21h, sun already long set, windows unlatched and open to the humid June air. No A/C, no screens, hardly a breeze coming in. Every night we’d sit in the semi-darkness — no overhead lights, just warm lamps strewn about — over simple concoctions: a roasted chicken and potatoes, crumbled beef warmed with spices, pastas, a tomato salad, the house red at our elbows. I’d set the table and, later, clean. I'm so glad you came all the way from Brooklyn to clean my plates! he once said, and my head sort of dropped into the sink laughing.

I’d gone to Paris that summer to be saved: pain, a seemingly endless stream of it down my leg, had take over. My life folded in as a result. I’d been told about a sorceress, a witch, a master spine teacher. I traveled to her apartment across the city almost every day, to practice standing, sitting, being in this body I’d once known so well and now could no longer handle. This teacher yelled and taunted and I tilted the knobs of my spice in various directions to please her, both things an impossibility.

But it was, in some ways, André who saved me. With the meals and the bed with the red comforter and the keys to a home across the ocean. He greeted me at the bottom of his flat’s winding wooden staircase when I made my way from Charles de Gaulle in late April. Carried my bag up the steps — the ones on which his daughter had broken her elbow when she slipped while holding her own baby (the infant was saved, not the elbow) — and welcomed me in like I was his other daughter, like I was simply coming home: here’s your room, you know it already, your bed, here’s the bathtub I know you love, you can hang your clothing here, here’s the coffee, the cafetière, the market down the street, the best stall to get strawberries, don’t be tricked by the other guy, this stall for plums, here’s the duck paté, here are the most buttery croissants. Here’s the bank, the Métro, the bus stop, some euros. Okay, my darling? Vas-y!

When I say that he saved me the summer I was 31 and lost in Paris, I think what I mean is that it takes many people to put us back together again over the course of a life. Nothing felt in my control then: not my unwieldy body, not the dance career or love life in tatters, not the meals I was served each night. Coming to Paris had been the first choice I’d made for myself in years, and it was mine alone. Before that I'd dutifully listened to doctors, healers, to people claiming they’d fix me but couldn’t. Before that I’d done the obvious things. This leap wasn’t that. When people say, you really went out on a limb! I had to laugh because I felt so far beyond any kind of limb.

So when, one night, deep into June, I decided to make dinner, the only one I made for him in two months, it felt like an assertion: of dignity, of health. I didn’t cook then, not much, anyway, in my tiny Brooklyn one-bedroom, but making that one meal — draining the pasta out of the boiling, salted water, mixing a few dollops of crème fraîche into the steaming noodles, cutting parsley with scissors and letting it drop in, adding a few squeezes of lemon and some salt and pepper and plating the whole thing — I realized I could. Simple as this meal was, I could cook for someone.

If I could stand there on these same two legs, making dinner, rather than wait quietly while someone served me food of their choosing, something had shifted. Maybe, slowly, I was returning to my body. Maybe this body had choices. Maybe it could heal. Maybe all those hours of trying to shift those knobs of spine with my breath and my attention had actually taken. Maybe I’d needed it all: the bed, the food, the open windows, the taunting, the fear, the love. Maybe I’d needed a place to imagine myself whole again.

Sending love,
Abs xo