THE SIXTIETH PAGE

That was the quietest summer of my life.

Even as I railed against the handling of my second novel, and I plotted and schemed for foulest retribution he calmed me with an appreciation of a weed that suddenly dominated an area in which it had never been, or taught me that home-grown lettuce was truly edible with the proper dressing, or introduced me to his three M’s of poetry: McClatchey, Merrill, and Merwin. I exchanged the three for two of mine, Meinke and Mallarmé. He embraced the latter and took as his final motto, a throw of dice.

He maintained that he had no fear, because death had no memory.

The lad declared October his month of gentle sorrows. I don’t know where it came from for him. In the Catskills, it seems particularly true when suddenly on a foggy morning a bright orange tree shining on a faraway hill breaks out from all the green about it and heralds the end of summer and the beginning of winter. In subsequent mornings, other trees join it in the sorrowful celebration of death and decay.

Ours was a stylized relationship, ritualized in reading, so it’s not peculiar or over-dramatic that for me he engendered metaphor. He really was the green and dying avocado plant on the window sill and he was the flaming tree about to burn out of physical existence.