Christian Charnaux, passed away on Father’s Day
The touching tribute below by John Malick was read at his his 80th Birthday celebration.
Like all people worth knowing, Christian is a bindle of contradictions. He told me he always wanted to be a reporter. He consumes voraciously news, politics, and books in English and French. As an intellectual, he’s well read. With regard to his politics, he’s also, well, Red. A natural born Communist, or as we say in America, a Socialist, who would dare ask ridiculous questions, such as what is best for society? This certainly confuses Americans where it’s every man for himself. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Christian spent his early years in a small French village. But he was no choir boy. No, he was an altar boy, where each Sunday, he simultaneously developed a taste for fine wines and a distaste for hypocrisy. The family then moved to Paris, where he learned the Parisian art of delivering groceries. But he was destined for bigger things.
Seeking to avoid serving in the army, he asked his uncle for help. His uncle decided the military is just exactly what Christian needed and he was immediately drafted into the army. There he developed a keen appreciation of the benefits of insubordination. KP was definitely preferable to crawling on your stomach through the mud.
To escape, he decided to travel. First, he traveled to the east to check out Communism, where everyone was a comrade and no one was a friend. Then he went west to try Freedom, where no one was a comrade and everyone was a friend. Ah Capitalism. Freedom won. When he arrived in New York, he was desperate for work, and he took a job in a frame shop where he learned the trade of picture framing. This proved to be a marketable skill in this new country where everyone moved so frequently that all Americans were basically tourists.
He also developed an appreciation of the beauty of women, whose allure ultimately led him to San Francisco during the summer of Love. There, long before the discovery of weapons of mass destruction, he discovered he possessed the lover’s secret “weapon of crass seduction.” It was French, the language of love. I must confess I knew Christian for many years, and I assumed Merd was a compliment, since he used it so frequently. Only later did I discover that even shit sounds better in French.
This was a match made in heaven, because in San Francisco he met the love of his life, Stefani. He went to Cal, when it cost virtually nothing, studied accounting as an antidote to socialism, and landed a job as an auditor in a local bank. They married, his wife studied law, and became an attorney. They bought a home in Piedmont. It was just down the street a stone’s throw away. They arrived with two beautiful young girls that went to the Piedmont schools. Years later I met Christian, and I was surprised to learn his girls were friends of my children, since they all went to the local schools together.
And that was how this French radical leftist ended up my neighbor in the middle of a community with the politics of the “Daughters of the American Revolution.” Ah only in America.
Only a few short years later his beloved Stefani passed away, leaving Christian to raise his two daughters on his own. He started his own firm as a CPA. I’m not sure where we met, but it may have been just walking around the neighborhood. I was looking for a new accountant, and I noticed Christian stopping to pick up a penny. I knew immediately that he was my perfect accountant.
To introduce him to my Architectural firm, I invited him to visit a home we had just completed on Kaanapali beach in Hawaii. The owner had not moved in yet and we were camping in the house and enjoying the pool. It’s then that I realized that Christian was the perfect guest. Opinionated enough to be intriguing, but gracious enough to be invited back. Our friendship was sealed.
I was already bike riding with a group of friends called the Veloraptors and he joined us each morning for a ride to Montclair. That was 20 years ago. Bernard Pech, another Frenchman, and Elwyn Berlekamp, a mathematics professor at Cal, rode with us. And we were later joined by Andreas, a Swiss programmer, and Grant, another serious coder. Bernard and Christian are natural “frenemies” who disagree on just about everything. Like Churchill said of the Brits and the Americans, they were two friends separated by a common language. But arguments make the hills go quickly, so no one objected. I learned that the French talk by gesticulating with their hands. Which is not a good idea on a bike. And one morning after Berrnard stormed away Christian gave a French salute that left him on the ground with a broken shoulder.
It was a complicated fracture that cost him his practice, because, before Obamacare, with a preexisting condition he couldn’t get health insurance without a group policy. He joined a nonprofit, the Eastbay Center for the performing arts in Richmond. For years he thrived in this incubator for young artists until his recent retirement.
It’s a remarkable life that’s just beginning the next phase. He has moved to a spacious apartment on Lake Merritt. Each morning we still Wordle, recruit and ride. And we have traveled to Italy, France and beyond.
Christian makes obstinacy and grumpiness terms of endearment. And so what do you call this complicated bundle of contradictions? I call him a true friend.