Wally's Gone, One More Round.

Wally Aron is the first Tiaposian to actually be able to test the meaning of the word TIAPOS. From his side he can now tell us if This all really Is A Piece Of Shit or whether or not there is some kind of meaning, some reason for it all, or maybe if there are readers and listeners over there who pore voraciously over our blogs and stories and songs, maybe they even publish them amongst themselves and pass them along to anyone who has a few free hours, or maybe all the hours are free hours and they have some different kind of leisure activity they love to partake in, like sex or bowling.

My bet is that if Wally got to pick a leisure activity it would be tinkering around with old cars, preferably convertibles. I may be wrong. I only knew him for a dozen years or so, and he'd had a really full life before that. But -- you know -- in a writer's group like TIAPOS, you find out a lot about people, things they don't tell other people, things maybe even their mates or kids have never heard. We keep an unspoken pledge to listen, to comment and then to shut up about anything we should shut up about.

But -- we've never had someone abandon us like this. Do we really have to keep quiet now? Because I'm dying to talk about Wally's story about discovering oral sex. OK, I won't.

I'll say this: None of us knew quite what to say while he was reading it, I mean he was probably past 80 by then, but we all looked even more lovingly at his wife Julie after that. And when she died it was clear part of Wally was now someplace else too.

Wally's pledge to us was to love every story he ever heard, every one anyone in the group ever wrote. You could read "My dawg haz fleez" and Wally's comment would be: "That's great. Keep going. You've got a book there."

Criticism? Go someplace else. Ask Doug. Ask Jane. Ask Laura. If you want "You're the best writer since Shakespeare," Wally's your man.

He wrote a lot about his mother, who he called The Spitfire, and his dad and his uncles, who were strong men from the old Jewish neighborhood, which was McAllister Street in San Francisco, and his life growing up here, when SF Seals baseball players worked the docks during the winter, when he went to Galileo High School, when he was the editor of the Daily Californian and when they were just starting to build the Golden Gate Bridge. All so long ago, in another age.

Wally was already in his late 70s when I met him and you could think of a lot of words to describe him but "old" wouldn't be one of them. What a dude. "Tall," "regal," "kind." "Irreverently elegant."

Barb and I are going to a play tonight, Wall-Ass, but I promise we will drink a hefty toast to you before we go. If you need to get through to me for some editing on a story you're working on, try Facebook. They're everywhere.

Love,
Your old buddy, Doug