DIED 2018
YOU SHOULD READ First Comes Love, I told him, as I often do new friends. Gladly, he said. You should read The Bachelor’s Cat. Thus the friendship began, with bibliographic backup. My friend Miriam in Philadelphia had met him in the park while walking her dog and ever since they walked together daily. Maybe he’s a little old for you, she mused. But maybe not. He’d been a merchant marine, a semi-famous chef, a poet of wine, a professor of beer, but really, she said, it’s the way he listens. Which of course made me want to talk to him.
So I would recognize him at the train station, he sent me what I thought was a painting of a bald-headed baby but turned out to be a comic self-portrait. He suggested he bring along the poem he had performed the night before at the Philadelphia Erotic Literary Salon. Hoo boy, I thought. Nonetheless, we spent several enjoyable hours at the Blue Pit Barbecue talking about food and praising our dogs. Our second meeting was put off due to an ice storm, then melted away. By this time, I had disappointed so many potential suitors, I knew not to drag it out.
We did become friends, at least pen pals, and followers of each other’s work. Thank God the cat doesn’t die, I wrote him after finishing his novel, then Thank God the man doesn’t die, after his memoir of throat cancer, but sometime after I went to the party for his book of poems, the trouble returned. He hid it from his friends, Miriam told me, no one knew until the day he had to go to the hospital. When she went to check on his dog, she saw the result of his pride and denial. The dog was alive, but far from well, and had not been taken outside in quite some time.
Though he would not have approved of the food—white-bread tea sandwiches and an ordinary fruit salad for an oyster-whisperer, a man who debrined capers and fileted jackfruit—Miriam thought he would have enjoyed the turnout of exes at his funeral, including even the very last, whom he had met on a dating site while in hospice. He never lost his enthusiasm for new beginnings. I myself, a one-date wonder from Baltimore, would have been there if I’d known.