Loss

Most of you probably know that Oscar’s Grandpa John passed away Wednesday. Much has been written about John – about his incomparable lyricism, his tremendous generosity, his staggering intellect and his fierce decency. But what I’ll remember most about John is not so much his sagaciousness -- or his sagas (which never suffered from their endless retelling) -- so much as the expressions of childlike glee he’d exchange with our boy.

When Oscar was an infant, Jen marveled that John had proved to be such a “baby symp.” Sure, he was gentle and kind, but it was nonetheless surprising to see John -- he of the turtlenecks, tweeds and owlish Lennon glasses, a man who lived so fully in a world of ideas -- get right down on Oscar’s level from his earliest days and mask the child’s excitement at being, his wonderment at the world around him. John, the Great Man who so often Did the Right Thing that white men aren’t wont to do, the greybearded Cyclops of the critical world whose glowering great eye burned straight through the artifice of highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow to reveal the essential stuff underneath, the weatherbeaten poet who had battled his personal demons to hell and back only to take on cancer, had simply never lost that awesome sense of wonderment.

It was something essential to John, and it was the basis of his bond with Oscar.

Jen had the talk with Oscar – told him that we were all sad, because Grandpa had died and we weren’t going to see him anymore. I added to that, later, when he and I were sitting on the porch at Sue and John’s, where he and Grandpa often sat together, that when people that we love die, we carry pieces of them with us. I know it’s a cheesy cliché, and maybe it’s just my simplistic atheistic substitution for Pearly Gates and other Hereafter superstitions, but I believe it. And I know that Oscar will carry with him that sense of wonder that John shared with him, well past the age when the cruelties of life and/or self-abuse and neurochemical imbalances conspire to snuff it out in most of us. So long, John. We miss you.