“Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do,
I’m half crazy all for the likes of you.
I am too poor for marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage,
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two …”

I don’t believe in Paradise.
I do believe in Address Books.

Time of Departure

ideon died first. Locked in the room with jumpstart heart-shockers, unsuccessful—a pretty gifted dark kid who’d always been only lucky (till this), a boy whose new cashmere sweater was often a green as sweetly acid as the colors in his pictures. He assumed that he alone would somehow be saved, by friends with connections, saved because of all his genuine unrealized promise.

At his funeral, twenty mourners held on to each other. Angie, determined to push Marco’s wheelchair, kept bumping into drainage slots and tombs, half-blind from our week’s crying.

Gideon had had the goods but often used them up, on splendid times. He maybe figured he could finally “apply himself,” could become fully superb when he was old and homely, and getting no better offers. (Who on earth can blame him?)

It pained me, his being buried here, in such a cut-rate sort of Jewish cemetery in far Queens. The boneyard rested, pummeled by screams, direct on the flight path of La Guardia Airport. We tried saying our goodbyes out here; the few of us gathered were little aided by a dwarf-sized rental rabbi who had never known our friend. We screamed, “Gideon liked … Gideon could always …” beneath the howl of jets that swooped so low we might jump up and nearly touch metal. Gigantic silver planes (so close you could count their undersides’ rivets) swept over this squat ghetto, gray stones somehow urban. We, already stooped by mourning, we ducked even further. Jet noise seemed a new part of the diaspora’s old humiliation.

Here lies a beautiful boy who painted boats and houses, who, though forever broke himself, still managed to give his nephews refurbished forest-green Volvos to take to Tufts. Here lies a boy who caused the world to fall in love with him, and who allowed us to forgive him for never quite solely loving us back enough, for never playing at work quite hard enough at work. He had other gifts and he gave all those away, with a generosity that shamed the smallmindedness of his fond, loan-holding survivors.