Message from Jim St. Clair

James M. Bucciarelli--Long-time Friend
Arriving as a beginning teacher in 1954 at New Canaan High School, I was assigned to teach Latin. Among my early students in the graduating class of 1957 was Jim Bucciarelli, who came to be a very engaged student of Latin and much interested in the writing of the Roman poet, Vergil, the author of the “Aeneid.” His great sense of humour and his obvious intelligence added much to our class study of the themes of Vergil. The laughter in his eyes and his voice remain with me to this day.
It was my great joy as well to work with students in the production of plays. Jim was a student director of the production “Cheaper by the Dozen” and the lead actor in the senior play, ‘ The Man Who Came to Dinner” of which I was the faculty director. What a fun time!!
We developed a strong friendship which continued through the fifty years since his graduation from high school and his studying at my alma mater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Many long conversations and a visit by him to our family ancestral home (now my year-round home) in Nova Scotia were highlights of our friendship. I recall with much delight our enthusiasm for the hope contained in the musical version of “Candide.”
Although we were of different religious backgrounds, we had a common enthusiasm for the depth of Christianity. It is perhaps this deep awareness of the role of the spirit in our lives which continued through the years of geographical separation and was an understood “tie that bound our hearts in Christian love.”
The lines of Vergil are foremost as I think of his life--“ Semper honos, nomenque, laudesque manebunt... always your quality, your personality and the accomplishments of your life will remain with me so long as rivers flow from mountains to the sea, so long as shadows race across the land as the sun and the clouds interplay, so long as the stars shine”
I bid him farewell and weep for all that was, and all that was not with the words from Christian literature, “ nothing separates us from the Love of God, neither life nor death . . . faith, hope and love remain and the greatest of these is love.” May his spirit rise up on eagles’ wings to be free at last and join with the great Eternal Spirit!!
From across the years and from across the continent and with hopes of communication through eternity, I say, “ Jim B., Jim the Younger, my friend I shall continue to remember you and to love you.” I send my thoughts to to his family with special affection as well for Joan and Diane.
Jim Maior (Jim the older)