Imre Komaromi died yesterday morning. He was only 56. He'd been diagnosed with congestive heart failure about four years ago, but I didn't know that, because I never met him.

Imre was Hungarian in descent, born in Austria in 1946. He and his parents moved to the U.S. when he was about six, and he didn't speak English at the time. Despite this, he became an avid reader as a kid, partly because of feeling "different" among his schoolmates, and developed a fondness for Walt Kelly's Pogo, a fondness the two of us shared. But I never got to look at a copy of the strip with him, because I never met him.

Imre became a U.S. citizen and loved his adopted country. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, and he never lost his taste for its slightly exotic language, the peculiar turns of phrase and semi-Joycean vocabulary. (Perhaps it was the same strange flavor that he enjoyed in Pogo.) From time to time he'd wax nostalgic about a port of call, or a strange naval ritual, or even a piece of equipment with which his commanders had made him intimately familiar. I loved these tales of his experiences, but I never got to hear one.

Imre was an inveterate punster. Any comment could be turned into a play on words, often with a wee bit of sexual innuendo involved, and if a long shaggy-dog story could be constructed to frame the pun, so much the better. He was also a conservative in the best sense of the word: he believed in keeping good things around. He didn't always trust change, and his roots in the Catholic Church were deep and meaningful to him. At times his attitude could frustrate those who disagreed with him, but he was always willing to seek peace at the expense of righteousness. He once said of himself that his role was that of "the Ace bandage around the reflexively jerking left knee." It was a role he played beautifully and thoughtfully, with a little heat and a lot of light. I wish I'd gotten to see him play it in person.

Imre had been a teacher in the Missouri Corrections System, and his experiences teaching inmates in the prisons fascinated me and many others. He confronted on a daily basis some of the issues and people that we can easily ignore, and all too often do; there was a lot to learn from him, and based on what he taught me, he was a good teacher. But I never set foot in his classroom.

Imre had two children, a son and a daughter, both in their twenties. The former was also named "Imre," but was known by a nickname taken from Pogo, where all the young critters were referred to as "tads." He lives in Missouri, in the same town where Imre did. His daughter Ann is a professor--teachers run in families, as I well know--and teaches Russian literature in Philadelphia. His pride in them was fierce, his love for them fiercer still. He and their mother had divorced, and he had gone through several other relationships, but something seemed to swell up inside him whenever he mentioned either kid, as if he were a bullfrog ready to roar across a pond the size of the Atlantic. I hope Tad and Ann know how important they were to him; I'd like to meet them someday, so they can know he was important to a lot of us.

What makes Imre's death strange is that it comes here in the early days of the internet age, when people are just beginning to form communities online. We don't yet know quite how to handle the loss of a friend whose face we've never seen, whose voice we've never heard, but the loss is real. I knew Imre only through the pixels that appeared on my computer screen. My image of him is pieced together from the words he formed and sent to Readerville. I never shook his hand, or bought him a beer, or groaned when he made another joke about Tony Orlando and Dawn, or heard him shout something provocative about a book. I never went to his home. His family doesn't think of me as his friend. I didn't know him.

But I did. He was a writer in the most important sense of the word. He put words together in a way that imparted meaning to me; he demonstrated his emotions and his convictions to me; he provoked me into laughter and understanding and tears. I sometimes worry that writing is too imperfect a medium, that even the greatest authors can't give us a real understanding of what another experiences, that we can't really know each other through the written word. But when I think of what I learned from Imre in these last three years, I realize that we can.

I have met Imre, and he is us.

That's the worst possible pun I can come up with, and it's all for you, buddy.
5:53 AM

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