A Circle of Two
(in memoriam for Bob Hock)
5/20/31 ~ 6/25/20
I remember thinking
What if this is
the last time I ever see him?
Bob had just come from the CVS
and was crossing 42nd street with
an un-customary grimace on his face
contorting into a crescent smile
the moment he saw
me closing in.
I could tell he was in pain
and he probably
didn’t want me knowing it,
never wanting to draw attention
to his defects or what might
be ailing him
as he was trying so clumsily
to be one of the living.
“Oh Bob,” he would scold himself
in the third person,
“Pull yourself together.”
But there we stood
on that perpetually windy corner,
Bob’s CVS bag bloated
with an addict’s spoils
and me gripping my backpack
cross my shoulder,
chockfull of vague concern.
“You’re the soul of determination”
I told him, trying to be
encouraging.
I had heard he’d come round
in the last week
to Bingo and was looking much better.
They say he’d even been
seen gobbling down an ungainly sized
wedge of cake at the senior hour;
a grown man mimicking
a saucer-eyed child.
I can just see the theatrical face
he must have made,
the actor in him
ever ready to
return to the boards.
Bob would announce himself
with that funny gait of his,
a stride that, I felt sure, had been quite sexy
in youth, but now had evolved into
a kind of wounded affectation. I knew
he was in pain only because
we once spoke about
the spaced out effects of pain pills
after an un-characteristic confession
that his feet
had hurt him everyday
for a decade.
Still, he managed to smile.
“How are you feeling,” I asked.
“Oh, I’m soldiering on,” he said flippantly.
Bob would always leave room
for life to return to a comedia.
His own pratfalls had unfortunately
become all too common.
Dressed in his plaid
flannel shirts and suspenders
and sporting Freud’s reading glasses
you’d be forgiven to think him
a sophisticated hayseed,
but of course, with an Ivy League education.
Bob’s quaintness was disarmingly
old school.
I once saw him talking
to a much younger man
that looked like the other end
of himself.
I wondered whatever were
they telling each other.
Why is it so odd
to see the young interact with the old?
Maybe because there's only so many ways
you can hide infirmity with a smile.
And yet, he was smiling.
“I keep to myself”, he once said.
“Young people are from outer space.”
I laughed, convinced that it
was just his fatigue talking.
But who knows? Maybe we are
all only the stuff of stars
until we birth a soul.
My inner thoughts continued
to square the circle.
What if we were cobbling
our souls together
all along
every time we dared to use
the imaginary tools
of childhood?
If that were true,
what an arsenal
Bob had possessed.
I say “had” because
this gentle accomplished man
could no longer recall
his accomplishments.
If it comes to that,
maybe the truest thing
we can trust in
is the present moment
after all.
Bob had a fear of falling.
Life had become a balancing act,
each day passed in
a death-defying circus ring.
Of late, he’d taken to walking
around the block
gripping tightly to his rollator,
daring someone
to meet his eyes.
More than that, he wanted
to be seen through
to his very insides.
To meet that person
who could comprehend the
journey that was curling
around itself like a nucleus
at the heart of him,
as if recognition might
close the circle.
Was I that person?
In this last year Bob
had lived like a moon
ever on the wane,
slowly surrendering
it’s phases in the sky,
unable to remember
his life
in the spotlight,
his handsomeness
sunk beneath
it's lunar surface,
nevertheless he was
a man of an
astronomical inner beauty.
Now, here, amidst
the unrelenting realism
of 10th and 43rd street,
a wind conspiring to
blow us both away.
I hugged this
tender comrade
of a man
and for one
indistinguishable moment
we were
a circle of two.
Peter Valentyne
February 9th, 2019
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