A pillow case of his own January 2, 2024
I had to retire a pillow case that I have owned for 50
years, one filled with images of planets, part of a set I purchased in 1974
when my best friend, Paulie, asked if he could sleep over when I was still
living in a rooming house in Montclair, in a room that had once belonged to
Meatball, but which I had taken over because it had windows on two sides and
let air pass through on particularly hot days.
Mike Riotto, who had attended St. Brendan’s with me, only a
year behind my class, lived in a converted closet next door, monk-like.
To this day, I do not know why Paulie needed to stay over,
since he had already moved from Pine Street in Montclair to Passaic Street in
Passaic, but I was not completely prepared to have guests in a single room.
To prepare for his stay, I went down to a store on
Bloomfield Avenue and purchased the set of bed sheets and pillow cases to
accommodate him with fresh linen, trying to find a theme that would fit my
friend’s tendency to believe in flying saucers.
I don’t even recall if he commented on the bed sheets, and
he was gone fairly early the next day, leaving me one extra set of linens to
wash and carry on later.
Over the years, the rest of the set vanished either from
wear or from being left behind in one move or another until all that remained
was one pillow case, which for some reason, I kept – but not out of nostalgia,
at least, not then.
I really didn’t think much about it since having only one
pillow case and four pillows did not provide a practical use for it, although
after Paulie’s death four years ago this month, I recovered it from our linen
chest and used it, only to have the wear and tear on it finally make it
impossible to use, torn on the wrong end so that the pillow stuck out when I
tried to sleep on it.
I guess maybe I kept it because it reminded me of that time
when we all still have great hopes for the future, a future that never quite worked
out the way we wanted, and yet, the pillow case – each time I uncovered it from
the corner of the chest – made me think of him, and his potential, and how much
I admired his ability as a musician and artist, even though I had to tolerate
his outlandish beliefs about UFOs and global climate change.
As sad as all this sounds, I find great pleasure in physical
objects that preserve moments like those, and the fact that the pillow case wore
itself out at this time of year (torn on New Years Eve), it represents for me
the whole nature of change, and how we cling to the past even as we plunge into
the future.
I never stop missing Paulie because he and my other best
friend, Hank, inspired me to become someone I would not have become without
them, if not quite a great artist or writer or musician, then someone who still
aspires to become something more than I was, working every day to hone a craft
I know I will never be great at, but which gives me great joy doing.
I strongly suspect Paulie felt the same way, working even to
the end of his life at an art that would never put him in any history books (except
those I continue to write about him), but in love with the process of creation,
knowing that life is about doing, not being, and greatness matters less than being
inspired.
This month marks the fourth anniversary of his passing, and
so I will keep the pillow case – in whatever condition it might be in – as a physical
memory of a man who changed my life for the better, his spirit filling me with
dreams I would not have dreamed without him, even when I can no longer lay my
head on that otherworldly pillow case, which will now remain like a museum
piece in the bottom of that chest as I use newer and more practical linen. I
will think of that night when he stayed over, when I sat in the corner with rock
records, both of us singing along, both of us living the life we chose to live
rather than the life others expected of us, both of us caught up in a time warp
of changes that we refused to accept as inevitable, our lives being the process
of living and not what came out at the other end.
Maybe nobody will ever remember Paulie as great the way I
do, but I could care less, since my thinking of him that way is more than
enough.
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