there are too few like you, Jack.

20Mar08

 

Keivan introduced me to Marcel about a year or two ago, when we were trying to convince him to move to Nashville and join us at Vanderbilt for his post doc.  But Columbia won him instead, and since then, Marcel’s been working in the lab, supervising  a special group of high school students, and taking his dad to the MOMA on Tuesdays.  I met Jack recently, at a fundraising walk for the Alzheimer’s association (and blogged about it here).  That’s them in the picture on that day–Marcel on the left, Jack on the right.  We spent a truly gorgeous fall afternoon walking the west side parkway, getting to know one another a little bit and feeling hopeful about the future.  Jack does have a winning smile, is gleeful really, and also evermore ill with the disease that will soon take his memory.  I didn’t know that day, but it turns out that Jack’s a celebrity–a Puerto Rican-El Barrio poet and translator of note, former Director of El Museo del Barrio (which is a stone’s throw–without much effort–from my present apartment), and an activist who held a hunger strike in the late ’60s in protest of the lack of PRicans in government (I might note that my uncle was protesting the exclusion of minority artists from the Whitney Museum around the same time).  Jack’s also been a father and a husband, and a friend to many.  Unfortunately, Jack doesn’t have Medicaid yet, and Marcel and his family are paying out of pocket (with some help from the Alzheimer’s association) for his health care, until his application is approved.

there’s a gorgeous NYTimes article describing the event on Tuesday night that’ll make you feel as if you were there.  I hope it does, because I hope that you’ll find it in your heart to read some of Jack’s poetry–buy his books from Hanging Loose press–or send a donation to Jack care of his son and my friend Marcel Agüeros (Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Mail Code 5247, 550 West 120th Street, New York, N.Y. 10027).

Here’s a teaser (which also appears in the Times piece):

Lord,
on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder
why there are shoeless people
on the earth.

Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.

– “Psalm For Distribution” from Jack Agüeros, “Lord, Is This a Psalm?” (Hanging Loose Press, 2002)

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