Sad and Beautiful World

June 4, 2012

Here’s a photo of Morty Gaber, my friend and former boss, who died a month or so ago at the age of 87. I mention this photo in an essay up today on The Classical.

The last time I saw him was in the early 2000s. I ran into him on the street one day near his apartment on 9^th Street by University Place. I was with my girlfriend, now my wife. I’m glad he got to meet her and that she got to meet him.

I first met Morty sometime in the mid-1980s. I must have come by the store he owned, located in Manhattan on the south side of 8^th Street between Mercer and Greene, to visit my brother, who had gotten a job there through a posting on a bulletin board at the NYU employment office. I have written about first meeting Morty many times, but these writings, like much of my obsessive writing about the past, are fictions built out of a need to see life changing. I don’t remember meeting him. I look back, and at a certain point he was just there. Now he’s not.