Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Small things...

August 24, 2009

1) When I got my First Real Job (which lasted six months working for New American Library), I was living in Plainview and commuting. For the first week or two, David and I were taking the same train. He gave me all his favorite commuting tips about where to stand on the platform and so on, and he told me how many post offices (? That’s what I remember them being, but that doesn’t seem right) there were between the Hicksville station and Penn Station). I remember thinking, “Once I’m an Experienced Commuter, I too will have observed and known all these things.” Which of course didn’t happen: that was just David being a first-class noticer. I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and he started quoting the first line of it; a Spanish-speaking woman saw the book and overheard us, saying “To me, it is all true.” I thought, “Wow, this is great! I’ll be having literary conversations with strangers on the LIRR all the time!” and of course that was the only one….

2) I did some totally minor favor for him for which he was disproportionately grateful. Every year thenceforth, he’d send a package of dog biscuits for my dog @ Chanukah—very sweet and thoughtful gesture.

3) Exchanging emails with him and mentioning an obit which I found amusing: it was for someone who’d been the artist who’d designed the credits for a number of movies in the fifties (one of them was “The Man with the Golden Arm”). David knew who this person was by name immediately, adding, “He was incredibly stylish.” Stupid detail, but it just struck me as very David that he knew who this person was and that he could sum him up so neatly.

Emily Schulman

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