We brought Jeremy home from the hospital and my work study became Jeremy’s room, the tabletop I’d made a work desk shoved up against a wall.
Not long after, our good friends, the Jijmejians, visited. They were the first friends we’d made when we’s moved to New Haven three years before.
We’d spent the day in New Haven looking for an apartment to rent and Esther asked a woman on the street for directions. Late in the afternoon, when we were trudging back to the train station to return to New York, the same woman leaned out of a window and asked us to come up and rest a bit. That’s how we met Aram and Adrienne, their elf-like daughter Suzie and teenage Annie. We sat for a while, talked, had coffee and pastries. Aram drove us to the train station. When they heard we’d be coming back the next weekend to look some more for an apartment, they insisted we stay with them. They were good friends.
I’d placed the plaster dog turd from Spain –the one I had worn as a tie clasp on Christmas eve– on the corner of my desk in Jeremy’s bedroom.
Adam, Suzie and I went in to look at Jeremy, who was sleeping. 
Susie kept staring at the desk and the turd.
“Do you know what that is, Suzie?” said Aram. “That’s Jeremy’s first movement.”
“Yeah, we’re going to bronze it,” I said.
The year passed. It was the fourth year of my fellowship. My dissertation crashed –too ambitious a project. Just as my funding ended, I was forced to start anew. (The next two years, I suffered from a two-year writer’s block during which I would typically throw away more text in a month than I created new.) I landed a half-time job teaching at Wells College, on Lake Cayuga in New York State, up river from Ithaca and Cornell. We moved there in the summer of 1971.
***
Before we left, my friend Larry Powell gave me a record as a going away present: the Charles Lloyd quartet. Lloyd was big then but I traded it in for a record by Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Natural Black Inventions. What a killer album that was! Kirk played multiple instruments on it (tenor sax, manzello and stritch, various flutes including nose flutes, and an instrument he made up composed of different lengths of garden hose –you blew through them like a set of pan pipes), Joe Habab Texidor accompanied him on sock cymbal and miscellaneous percussion instruments including a thunder sheet, and Maurice McKinley played drums on some cuts. Years later, in Ithaca, Esther and I heard Kirk play in a club.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 