WE BECAME FRIENDS

by David R. Slavitt

 

 

Okla was teaching at Ohio Wesleyan and he had invited me to appear there, to read poems and talk about poetry, and also to talk about movies, because as a young man I had been the Newsweek movie critic for a couple of years. I don’t remember much about my reading or my talks, but I do recall vividly the party late in the afternoon at the house of the English department chair. There were cat environments, those multi-level structures cats can climb on and play in. When I asked how many cats she had, she told us that they had all died, but she kept these appurtenances so that their ghosts could come back and play at night. Okla and I managed to keep straight faces, because it wasn’t a joke: she apparently believed what she had just told us. It was only an hour or so later, after we’d left her house and had walked a little way down the street that he and I looked at each other for a moment and then, without a word, burst into the laughter we had so heroically repressed. It was at that instant that we became friends.

 

 

 

 

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