We Did It for You, Jack

I was sitting at my word processor thinking about writing a tribute to Jack Smith when I noticed a piece of lint on the carpet near my desk.

It wasn’t the biggest piece of lint I had ever seen, but it was there nonetheless. I stared at it for a while and then looked away, hoping it would be gone when I looked back.

That happens sometimes. Lint has powers not granted to other small things. It is able to appear and disappear at will, and that has always fascinated me. I spend a lot of time picking up lint.

I stared at the computer screen for a while, thinking about Jack, his sweetness and his talent, and then turned quickly again to confront the lint.

It was still there, but vanishing. I think it has something to do with the movement of sunlight in a room, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got down on my hands and knees to go for the lint when my wife, Cinelli, walked in.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m writing a tribute to Jack Smith,” I said.

“On your hands and knees? You look like a grasshopper.”

“I’m taking a lint break.”

“Not that again.”

*

Cinelli hates it when I pick up lint. Well, “hate” isn’t the right word. It annoys her. She finds it in my pocket at clothes-washing time and has to remove it piece by piece. She says it makes her feel like a chimp picking fleas off its mate.

“Are you going to hunch down there forever?” she asked, wondering if at last I had taken total leave of my senses. “Write the Jack Smith tribute. Then I need you to take out the garbage.”

“A tribute like this can’t be hurried. I have to come up with new superlatives. All the usual ones have been preempted. I need powerful adjectives to summarize Jack.”

I’m not sure a superlative is an adjective. Grammar has never been my strong point. You’d have known, Jack. You always knew things like that.

“Look,” Cinelli said suddenly, “I don’t have time to stand here while you crawl around on the floor. I’ve got to fix the dryer. Taking out the garbage doesn’t seem too daunting a task. Think of it as increasing the blood flow to your brain. It’ll help you write.” I remember before my heart bypass surgery when Jack tried to cheer me up. He’d already had his bypass and it worried me because equipment failure had deprived him of oxygen during the operation. “Well,” he said, “it may have caused brain damage, but don’t worry. That doesn’t impair the ability to write a column.”

“There you go,” Cinelli said, helping me up. “Now will you take out the garbage? It’s been sitting by the front door for a week. The smell is making the cat sick.”

*

I recall reading in one of Jack’s essays how much he disliked taking out the garbage. It seemed somehow demeaning. I fight it too. Once I went for 91 consecutive days without taking out the garbage. It was a new record. In terms of resistance, I was the Babe Ruth of garbage-averters.

Like Jack, I’m not crazy about cats, either. I really believe they try to suck the breath out of babies. After a few drinks once, I challenged my son to see who could bowl the cat farthest down a hallway. He declined. I won by default.

Back to Cinelli. We were face to face. It was garbage-challenge time again.

“You know that lifting garbage hurts my back,” I said with the kind of whine that causes mothers to turn in alarm.

It’s too bad Jack never heard me whine. I mean, I am a journeyman whiner. I learned it as a private in the Marines and, later, as a reporter. He probably did too. I’ll bet he was one hell of a whiner at home.

“Sometimes,” Cinelli said, sighing, “I get awfully tired of your bad back, your bad heart, your bad leg and your bad attitude.”

I love that woman, Jack, the way you loved Denny. We were, I am, blessed with special people to lead us through life. They suffer our inadequacies lightly.

“I can’t help it,” I said, raising the whine level a notch. “Feel sympathy for a damaged veteran.”

“All right,” she finally said, “I’ll take out the garbage, you look for lint. When I’m finished, we’ll pick fleas off of each other.”

“I’ll never forget you for this,” I said. “Now I can write the tribute to Jack.”

Cinelli lifted the garbage bag, then turned to me. “I think,” she said wisely, “you already have.”

She knew and I knew what was going on. We had engaged in the kind of small moment Smith wrote about so well. In its way, it was our tribute. So is this column.

We did it for you, Jack.