Here are a few small memories of Mark, from childhood to recent years:
When we were little and an adult asked us what we wanted to
be when we grew up, instead of saying fireman or pilot or even artist, like the
rest of us, Mark would always say: oceanographer. We had no clue what that was,
and maybe he didn’t either, but it sure sounded cool.
In first or second grade, Mark and I went through a brief
period when, on bathroom breaks, we would wash all the mirrors with soapy paper
towels, and then dry them to an immaculate shine. It was all his idea, but I
eagerly joined him. This lasted a few weeks. We had to work rapidly, because
the breaks weren’t long, and there was a feeling of excitement at doing
something not exactly naughty (and maybe even good) but unknown to the
teachers. When they found out, they didn’t really get mad, but they made us
stop.
While we were still in college but home in Cincinnati for
Christmas break, a group of our high school classmates met up to go to “The
Last Waltz” at (if my memory serves me) The 20th Century Theater in
Oakley. I was wearing a blue jean jacket, and when we met on the street, Mark
made the remark, “I’ve never owned a jean jacket.” I wasn’t sure if he was
looking slightly askance at my plebeian attire. But, having come from a formal party,
he was wearing a tuxedo, so my retort was ready-made: “And I’ve never owned a
tux.” He laughed, and I can almost hear him say, “Fair enough.” I’m not sure I
ever saw him in a jean jacket, but he certainly became fond of denim overalls.
When Julie and I got married in November 1981, Mark was
studying literature at Oxford, but, as he told me, he was not one to miss a
wedding or a funeral. He flew back a few days early and joined us for
Thanksgiving with Julie’s family in Boston. (See photo in Gallery.) At the wedding, one of Julie’s
friends thought he was my father (he was 23). Afterwards, he drove us back to
New York, with Ben Lowenthal riding shotgun while Julie and I snuggled in the
back seat. (We had our real honeymoon the following summer.)
Mark and I overlapped for a year at Stanford (1985-86). One
of the highlights of that year was the fabulous production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus that the business school put on,
with Mark in the role of Dysart and Todd Harris as Alan. The Grateful Dead played a lot of
concerts in the area that year, and sometimes Mark and I would go together or
meet up at the show. If I wanted to find him, I just searched the floor for his already bald head, bouncing to the rhythm. After one concert at Frost Amphitheater, on Stanford’s
campus, when he was not in any condition to drive (ahem), I drove his white Volvo
back up the winding road, through red-limbed manzanita groves, to his group
house on Skyline Drive, where we sat on the ridge and watched the sun set over
the Pacific, turning into a red ziggurat before it slipped under the horizon.
Mark, David Henry, and I drove to Cincinnati together for
our 20th high school reunion in 1996. I’m sure there were a lot of
good conversations, but what I remember better is that we spent a significant
portion of the drive playing a quiz game of our own invention: we took turns
reading passages from a massive poetry anthology, while the other two tried to
guess the author. We were all pretty bad at it, actually. Mark, of course,
wanted to stop for a long, leisurely dinner, whereas I wanted to just grab a
bite and press on (we were already going to arrive late at night). Dave sided
with Mark, but I insisted that we hold the dinner break to an hour… which we
almost did. There was a lot of good-natured teasing going back and forth over
that.
In July 2013, I drove a rental truck containing some
furniture from my parents’ house in Cincinnati to our house in Dover, Massachusetts. One
of the items was a big hutch. We live in a small house, and the only place to
put the hutch was occupied by a massive, old, crappy upright piano that nobody
played. I asked Mark if he would help me move it out of the house, and he not
only said yes but added that he had a dolly and a handcart. I wasn’t even sure
what the difference was, but it seemed I had asked a professional. Not
actually, as it turned out (there’s a reason that piano movers exist, and have
their own union), but he had a lot more experience than I did, and he was a lot
stronger. Even so, the all-day process of moving the piano was like a slapstick
routine so glacial in pace that the humor often gave way to sheer frustration.
We labored to get the piano halfway through a doorway only to realize we didn’t
have room to make the turn that would get us to the front door. So we had to
backtrack and take a longer route through the dining room and kitchen, which
meant going through three more doorways, all of them posing their own
particular challenges. We strategized, joked, swore a lot, and smoked a little
weed. At one point the piano was listing on the dolly so that we couldn’t get
it through the last doorway. “We need straps,” Mark said emphatically. So we
made a trip to Home Depot and bought some straps. I didn’t know how to use
them, but Mark did. Somehow, by the end of the day, we managed to get the piano
onto the front porch, where it still stands six years later, threatening
to fall through the floor’s slats, its wood lamination covered in dust and
beginning to peel away.
