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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - JOE BY BY PAULA FOX - - - - We had several strong martinis with our friend Joe, who had been close to Frank O'Hara before the poet was murdered on a Fire Island beach by local thugs driving a jeep. We were leaving for a flight to Milan the next evening, and we made it, worse for wear because of the martinis. Joe had a Maine Coon cat, Darling, a beautiful alert animal that he loved dearly. The two of them lived in a flat on the far east side of New York City, on First Avenue and First Street, something like that. It's been decades since we saw him. Shortly after the evening we spent with him, Joe and Darling moved just outside Springs, New York, where he and the divorced friend of a painter, whom he loved as much as the cat, built a house that corresponded to their sensibilities and taste. His part of the house was connected to hers by a long bare passageway, cold in the winter. It was an agreeable American country house with many pretty objects signaling a certain kind of American literate taste. He grew very fond of her eight-year-old grandson who often visited her in the summer. One morning during the little boy's visit, the postman came in his postman's car and left mail for Joe and the boy's grandmother in the mailbox on a roughly painted post across the narrow country road that ran in front of the house. The boy ran out to get the mail and was hit by a car he didn't see that killed him at once. Joe's grief was not like the grandmother's, but as deep in a different way. We never saw Joe again, and only heard recently that he, too, had died. April 18, 2002
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