Arnold is right, the more I think about it: we who knew and loved Rob, as well as anyone who didn't know him but feels the loss anyway, should be sounding our echoes. Steve gives me a chance to make one small echo more.
Steve Dyer writes: I entrusted him with my treasured rare book collection which I had brought with me to San Francisco. What was that? Why the Song of the Loon trilogy: cowboy soft-porn and camp, totally out of print and unavailable except through connoisseurs of the series. Knowing Rob and his interests, you can tell how eager he was to borrow the books.
He always had great cowboy calendars, pictures of a nifty hunk (he definitely liked hunks) for each month. We always traded birthday presents, and one time he sent me one of these calendars, somehow having found a cowboy calendar with semi-hunks, more to my liking than his.
But on my first trip to his house, April of '88, something about that month's hunk reminded me of the Song of the Loon trilogy. I asked him if he'd ever read the books. Oh yes, he said, Steve Dyer lent them to me. I'd completely forgotten about this.
Steve: I recall breakfast at Rob's one morning with Jess, and fresh eggs from the chickens he kept in the barn (what were their names? Eleanor? Gertrude? Help me here.)
Ethel and Miriam.
Rob's breakfasts were always wonderful. Not only those fresh-as-possible eggs, but delicious pancakes, which he made the last time I was there, this past January. Rob was the first (and still the only) person I ever knew who ate tamales for breakfast. Tamales and fried eggs, it ain't half bad, I discovered.
Steve: I remember chatting about all manner of things over that breakfast before I was to leave for home. I remember looking in the bathroom and being astonished at the tub and tile and the glass of the shower doors; you could have performed surgery on any of these surfaces (gad, you could have done so in the kitchen or living room, too; maybe even the barn.) We could never have been lovers. :-)
The shower's glass doors and the tub and tile were sparkling that day because I had spent hours getting all the lime and soap spots off them the day before. As a housekeeper, Rob was a lot like me -- he could, but he didn't like to, and he only did when he had to. I volunteered to do the shower doors and the kitchen windows (oh shit, another flood; well, it's to be expected).
The barn evokes some pleasant memories. On my second trip there, it was (for me) crushingly hot, around 100 every day. The house was always quite a lot cooler than outdoors, even without air conditioning. Anyway, one of the days, Rob was working (still at PacBell, back then) and I was not going anywhere, just staying at the house, resting and reading. But I was to make sure the guys who delivered a truckload of hay for Oriana could get into the barn OK.
This turned out to be a delightful duty, for two such gorgeous young things showed up on a rickety truck as I seldom see. It being so terrifically hot, of course they had to whip off their shirts to unload the truck. I was ever so helpful, as you might imagine. I chatted them up in a big way and brought out a big pitcher of ice water, which they guzzled gratefully, greedily, running down their gleaming, hard, sweating chests. Oh oh oh. I had to rest when they left.
Steve: It's difficult to imagine soc.motss without Rob jumping into a discussion with his characteristic Talmudic precision. No, it doesn't feel real just yet.
Such an apt way to put it, Talmudic precision. He was easily the most analytical person I've known. Since I'm anything but, it made for many long and complicated exchanges, sometimes accompanied by a little heat when things got too complex for either of us. (Well, I doubt he would cede that they ever got too complex for him.) I used to try to extricate us from these conundrums by suggesting we leave it and come back to it another time.
One of the things I'm having the hardest time with now is that
there won't be another time. Thing to do, I guess, is
recall the times we had with fonder memories. That, at least, is
easy to do.
