Remembering Rob -- through everything that's been said here, and in email, and in the phone conversations I've had since I got back to New York -- remembering Rob is wonderful. It's when I realize why I'm doing all this remembering that it aches.
Rob was already a fixture in soc.motss by the time I got here, or at least it seemed so. (Of course, at that point everyone else looked like a fixture to me. That's the cabal effect.) I had occasional exchanges with him, always pleasant but not always agreeing, but we didn't really get to know each other well until I proposed to him.
Proposed? you ask. Well, you see, it was the time of the conceptual family, and there was a brief vogue of folks' claiming to wish that they were otherwise sexed, gendered or orientated [sic] so that they could marry each other. Meanwhile, in another thread (dare I say, "back at the ranch"?) Rob's kitchen was being drooled over by an impressive number of people. Rob responded that he was surprised to find his kitchen an object of such admiration, and added that all he needed was a husband to cook for.
So, in email (I'm nothing if not discreet, at least sometimes), I wondered whether he'd consider a (married) woman for the job, adding possessively that Marty wasn't up for grabs. I expected polite regrets, but his answer (in toto) was, "What about gropes or pats?" That was our betrothal.
I never did get to that kitchen, just as Rob never got back to NY. But I did meet Rob, in San Francisco last October. He put together the motss dinner for us there (and it was so dark in the restaurant that I didn't get a really good look at the color of those eyes). We had just arrived that day, so our talk was mostly about touristy things. By that time we had a regular and not wholly unsubstantial correspondence going. I felt, as I often do, that meeting face to face was important, but that our real conversations would be mediated by keyboards. I wasn't really right about that.
The following month I got a note from Rob saying that he planned to visit his family on Long Island and asking whether I'd be willing to organize a supper gathering for him here. (That, in fact, is how the NY dinners got started, folks, so there's something else for which we have Rob to thank.) Rob cancelled that trip because of Mark's death. Somehow, at that point, we began to supplement email with an occasional phone call. It added an emotional dimension to our exchanges that I can't quite describe. It doesn't happen with everyone, and when it does it usually means that email becomes a very secondary and unsatisfying channel of communication, but this was not so, for me, with Rob.
Too soon after that Rob called to ask a favor. The news from the lab wasn't good, and he thought it was time to tell his family that he was HIV+. He asked my help in looking up support groups so that he could refer his mother to one when he spoke to her. I made a couple of phone calls, was treated by all of the people to whom I spoke with remarkable warmth and considerateness, and was happy to report back to Rob that there was a group not far from his mother. He called me back after he'd spoken to them himself, sounding greatly pleased.
We managed to cram a long-term friendship into just over a year of close acquaintance. I was away for almost the exact time of Rob's hospitalization. I returned to seventeen messages on my answering machine, mostly about unrelated matters, but including calls from several motssers trying to reach me about Rob, some wanting me not to find out, first, by reading it in the news. Thank you, all.
As it happened, Jim Wood's call came in just after we walked in the door. I'm still awash in grief and overwhelmed by the suddenness of it all. But I'm also struck, not for the first time, by the magic of this family of ours, at the deep emotional ties we have forged with our impersonal computers, and at the commitment and generosity people here have towards each other. Rob was part of that, and will always be part of it for me.
Mara, still teary
