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We traveled through time together, from the time you were twenty-two until you reached eighty-seven.
I was eighteen when I first met you– you seemed older, more mature than I, although, looking back, I now see that age twenty-two is incredibly young.
While we waited for our first child, a kind neighbor & friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, invited us to live rent-free in a cabin he owned in Garapata Canyon, the path lined with fiddle-ferns that still bloom there. That was in Big Sur, an artists’ refuge surrounded by the cabins of Henry Miller, Roslyn Fassett, the Zen Center, Ansel Adams, Richard Brautigan, Emil White, Jack Kerouac, Jean Varda, Louise Jenkins, Nepenthe, and the Tor House of Robinson Jeffers. They greeted you as a fellow artist, for at that time you made handmade lights which glued together rice paper & wood.
We had a son, a daughter, & a son, born within a span of five years. They were & are the best thing that ever happened to me & us.
You were astonished to behold a mother’s breasts as big as watermelons, full of milk life energy. One day, my milk flow mysteriously slowed down & I cried. You talked to our friends & they advised you to bring me beer, non-alcoholic beer. It worked! A small glass, with its nourishing hops, barley, brewer’s yeast & iron, opened the floodgates & caused my breasts to fill & overflow.
I sewed flannel receiving blankets, and you sewed a patchwork outer blanket
from fabric scraps at the sewing factory where you worked for Barbara Sherwood, my best friend’s mother. You were embarrassed for others to find out that you sewed, for at that time sewing was considered to be exclusively women’s work, but when I forgot & mentioned that you made the gorgeous patchwork blanket of greens, reds, yellows, & browns, our friends were amazed & astonished –& you smiled a quiet smile of gratitude.
We had a multitude of things to feel grateful for.
You recited, in your pure sincere voice, “Baruch atah Adonai–Blessed are you, Lord” & lit a candle at shabbat & every Jewish holiday.
You taught us that a Jew talks back to God himself about the state of the world & the lot of the oppressed.
You respected my religion.
You cared for our babies when I took evening classes at City College.
You worked hard as a display artist at Dohrmann’s Dinnerware & China, at Cala Foods, at Cost Plus, & at other companies–to pay rent & put food on the table.
All the while, you continued to enrich the world by fashioning colorful God’s Eyes–Ojos de Dios–by designing silkscreen posters, & by hammering together tables, chests, beds for our children, & other furniture. Ruth Asawa, the neighboring artist at your spot in the Annual Civic Center Art Fair, admired & loved your work, & you admired her artistry as well.
There’s more, lots more.
Death is a wicked sharp knife.
Now that you’ve returned to elemental carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water, & other elements, as we all must, sooner or later, you nourish plants, flowers, trees, valleys, canyons, hills, mountains, the air itself, the Void. You’re still with us, especially the memory of your Samness–your laugh, your cry, your craft.
You visit us in our dreams:
‘Naked into the Dark we come,
Naked out of the Dark we go,
Come to me naked in the Dark.’
In Memoriam: Samuel Arthur Lefkowitz, born August 4, 1939-died April 6, 2025
World without end, Amen!