I got a phone call tonight from Man Oh Man’s friend Kris that he passed away this evening, just about an hour and a half ago as I write this. She was with him at the end in Columbia, Missouri, and sang to him as she sat with him in the hospital. He had been very sick but didn’t know it and by the time it was caught he had just a few days. I am glad he spent it with a good friend of long standing.
I was a relatively new friend. I got to know him in the past few years, when he moved up to Kirksville, where I was teaching at the time. We regularly got together for breakfast or lunch at one of the restaurants that were in town. Usually we ended up at the diner on the south side of town where we would talk for an hour or two over a very leisurely meal. We did discuss politics, but also gardening and his art, which consisted of very carefully drawn recreations of Islamic geometric designs. They were very exacting and drawn in pencil, then overdrawn in pen. Usually blue but sometimes black and occasionally red. White paper. Very delicate, very beautiful in their simplicity. I have one he gave me that I have yet to frame. He showed them once at a local gallery, not to sell them, but just to share what he had been working on.
Just this year, Joe (Man Oh Man) had cataract surgery. He’d been afraid he was going blind, but the cataract surgery suddenly meant he could see much more and could drive himself. It also meant he didn’t have to give up making the elegant drawings. Kris had a picture of him making a larger version on a sidewalk, probably during a local art walk. And of the finished product. He didn’t like having his photo taken, so I am glad she had a few to share.
Needless to say, Joe was a strong Democrat. He cared very much about the country from the national level to his own neighborhood. Joe got me to my first city council meeting in the 30+ years I had lived there; he’d only been there for two or so. He was concerned with what was happening to his part of town, where houses were being threatened so that someone could build another multi-unit storage facility, and wanted to tell the council to support those people trying to live in other parts of town from the country-club areas. The last time I spoke to him, he called to let me know that instead of the area being given over to storage buildings, someone else was buying the houses there and had started to fix them up to make them more sturdy and available to rent out. He would have neighbors instead of industrial units right next door.
What else can one say about a friend? He loved Challah, and was thrilled when I brought him a loaf every once in a while (either one I made or one from an out-of-town bakery). He played guitar and was just starting to find someone who would play with him, someone who Joe insisted was far better than he was. He was a great story-teller. He was a Vietnam vet.
Joe’s shoes.
Joe had a jar he told me was going to be his urn. I hope Kris can find it in his house. I could only tell her where it had been last time I saw it. He could have moved it.
His friend Kris sent me one she took today. He’s not in it, but he is there.
She asked me to include “The City of New Orleans” in tonight’s diary. It was what he was listening to when he passed.
