A MORE PERSONAL NOTE
Last night I walked myself over to a neighborhood bar for a glass of wine. It was 10pm, and there was one stool available. I wedged myself between a portly guy staring into his glass, and a business woman digging into a salad. I’m pretty good at dining and drinking solo, and more often than not I end up in conversations with the strangers around me, but for the time being I just sat quietly and flipped through the little notebook I’d brought along. Then the guy looks at me and says “What’s your name?” I tell him, and he gives me a wry smile and quips back: “Thanks for asking, mine’s Jack.” Ok. Well. Turns out Jack’s a chemical engineer and a good way through an entire bottle of wine. He peppers me with questions: what do I do, what do I love to do, where am I from, how do I feel about the sciences, etc. I tell him I’m in graduate school, I like to write and draw, I’m from not any place in particular and I always liked chemistry. Melting pennies and drawing compounds and all that. Jack agrees this is where the fun is.
After that transaction we sit in silence for a while, sipping our respective glasses of wine — mine red, his white. Then Jack turns to me and announces, in an surprisingly grave way, that he likes poetry. He recites something I don’t recognize, very slowly and in a low voice. Jack has a close friend, a fellow named Kenneth, who is a writer and who is dying of polio. “No one dies of polio anymore,” I say. “Yeah, well, this guy will.” Jack’s friend was infected in the 1950s, after being injected with a live polio vaccine, and he now suffers from something called ‘post-polio syndrome’. I’m not sure what to say to this — I thought we were going to talk about poetry, and now we’re talking about dying, and which now that I think about it, is totally appropriate. But Jack is visibly stricken; he stares at bar for a quiet moment. It occurs to me that this chemical engineer is in love with his poet friend. It might not be romance, but it’s definitely love. Deep love that can be read in his face and in his voice. A few years ago, Jack sold one of his homes in order to buy Kenneth a lift van — the kind designed specifically for people in wheelchairs, with the pneumatic platform that raises and lowers. Kenneth writes all of his books by dictating to an assistant — another thing Jack set up.
We go back and forth like this for a while, talking about various subjects but invariably returning to Kenneth, his poet friend dying of polio in 2009. Jack kills his bottle of wine, and I move on to a second glass. When he isn’t looking, I write in my notebook: “The chemical engineer in love with his poet friend.” For some reason it just feels really important. Then Jack pays his bill and leaves.
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