I can't sit here and write anything about the type of person you were and what the things I'll miss about you were. But I can say how much your writing has meant to me and how everytime I read through one of your books I get so sad towards the end because I know it's almost over, but only for a second, because it just means I'll get to re-read all my favorite parts again once I start over. And I always think of the Great Bladdered Emer after a large coffee. And the pie in the theater when I'm lonely. And God in the backyard when I take communion (which is never, but you know). My heart warms when I think of you and in my emergency-in-case-of-fire-bag, definitely lies a copy of all the words in the books you've shared with us. "...I'll never forget this hour on the pier with Horace with seagulls circling for what might comes and ships strung along the Hudson waiting for tugboats to dock them or push them out to Narrows,...Horace offering me another chunk of sandwich telling me I could use a few pounds on my bones and his surprised look when I nearly drop the sandwich, nearly drop it because of the weakness in my heart and the way tears are dropping on the sandwhich and I don't know why, can't explain it to Horace or myself with the power of this sadness that tells me this won't come again, this sandwich, this beer on the pier with Horace that makes me feel so happy all I can do is weep with the sadness in it and I feel so foolish I'd liek to rest my head on his shoulder and he knows that because he moves closer, puts his arm around me as if I were his own son, the two of us black or white or nothing, and it doesn't matter because there's nothing to do but put down the sandwich where a seagull swoops in and gobbles and we laugh, Horace and I, and he puts in my hand the whitest handkerchief I've ever seen and when I offer it back he shakes his head, keep it, and I tell myself I'll keep that handkerchief till my last breath" ('Tis)
Another long one but just too good to not write down:
"Things in shop windows have names I don't know and I don't know how I traveled this far in life in such a state of ignorance. There are florist shops along the avenue and all I can name beyond these windows is geraniums. Respectable people in Limerick were mad for the geraniums and when I delivered telegrams there were often notes on the front door, Please slide the window up and leave messages under the geranium pot. It's strange to stand at a florist's shop on Fifth Avenue remembering how delivering telegrams helped me become an expert on geraniums and now I don't even like them. They never excited me like other flowers in people's gardens with all that color and fragrance and the sadness of their dying in the autumn. Geraniums have no fragrance, they live forever and the taste makes you sick though I'm sure there are people there on Park Avenue who would take me aside and spend an hour persuading me of the glories of the geranium and I suppose I'd have to agree with them because everywhere I go people know more about everything than I do and it's not likely you'd be rich and living on Park Avenue unless you had a profound knowledge of geraniums and growing things in general" ('Tis)
