Friends Passing

Another good day at the museum, D and I tied up some loose ends and discussed the unease between certain parties, the I was the receptionist all afternoon, filling in for TR, off to be best man at an alcohol-free wedding. What fun. I on the other hand, had started celebrating St. Paddy's Day last night, so of course I misspelled Modigliani, and you can't imagine how dumb that really is without knowing that's there's a small print of favorite Reclining Nude push-pinned to the wall about 20 inches to my right. It's in my personal hand full of top paintings ever, I look at it all the time, sometimes with a magnifying glass; I've read extensively about him, AND I know how to spell his name. Trying to think ahead, probably, and accessed the wrong synapses. An interesting couple came into the museum this afternoon, they had previously owned a lot of the pieces in the Folk Art show, the Vogels, and the wife, Barbara, was a photographer, and she had photographed a lot of the artists, knew several of them for many years. She had stories and I had questions; I'm now, hands down, the docent for this show. Way too much information, which is the way I like it, if I have too much information I can be an interesting presenter; otherwise I'm kind of tight, working on the form of the presentation, when, in truth, a gush of verbiage, with mistakes in grammar and syntax, is more attractive to the bored college student. A person I knew well for a few years has died. I wrote about some incidents from that time in "Notes From The Cistern", he was important, in the ways he showed me how to investigate things that interested me. He taught Biology at the high school in Orleans, Cape Cod, Mass., and he was a hell of a teacher. A mutual friend called him early one morning and said that there was a Black Fish, which is a small whale, dead and beached outside Rock Harbor; and of course Peter wanted it: it was a mammal, they could dissect it in the parking lot. Which ended up involving the whole school for an entire day. We gigged eels together, night-fished for cod off the beach at night.and took some drugs that weren't illegal at the time. He built a house, just up from where I was house-sitting a house his father had built for "House And Gardens", one of those, that needed to be heated in the winter. I just had to pay the heating bill and it wasn't that much, so it was a great place to stay, and I mostly wrote and chased wild geese off the dock. I met a harbor seal that seemed to like frozen eels. At least found them interesting. A maritime popsicle that he couldn't address directly. We got to the point where he'd allow me to hold the thawing eel until he could snatch it away. After that the tape the tape goes blank. I swear I never had congress with a seal.