My poet pen pal Bob Arnold asked me the other day -- "Who's minding the store?" By which he meant -- Where's the new blog? I told him there wouldn't be one until I went to the Miami Book Fair International and The Chinquaupin School in Houston, Texas. But then I started thinking. . . maybe I should just write an update on some of my earlier blogs. So that's what I'm about to do.

The first blog I did on this site is about our old friend Karl Lipsky who was 94 when I wrote about him. This year, he turned 95 and a few days after his birthday he passed. We attended his Jewish-Irish wake rather than the private birthday party we'd planned to have with him. Karl and I used to swim together in Lake Buel and when he'd forgotten how to dive off the dock, he'd bend over, hold his hands pointed together like a little kid and ask, "Is this how it's done?" Then he'd just drop into the green water and disappear. I was always afraid he wouldn't come up but he always did.



One day after our cold swim in the lake, Karl pointed to an oak tree on the shore. "When that oak tree was a sapling," he explained, "I put a chrome soap dish on the lakeside of the tree and placed a red bar of Lifeboy carbolic soap in it." That was thirty years ago when he nailed the soap dish in place and when Karl turned 94 one year ago, we went to the tree and looked for the dish. All that was left of it was a rim of rusted metal. The oak had grown into a large shade tree and the hungry bark had all but swallowed the 1960s soap dish.
Karl looked at it and laughed. "When that bit of rust is gone, I'll be gone," Karl said with a chuckle. True to his prediction, this year the rim of rust was invisible and Karl is no longer with us. I won't say he's gone -- I can't say that because he's here with me now, in spirit, soapdish notwithstanding.