Art of the Odd

Have you ever had to write one of the those blog posts that had to be written before you could write anything else, only it was so hard to write that you put off writing it for weeks and weeks and didn’t get anything else written, either? Yeah, this is one of those posts.

On April 16, near the end of the work day, NovySan told me that Frank A. Lauro was dead. Frank was Novy’s best friend in high school. They drifted apart in college, as friends sometimes do, but they’d been back in touch recently. The words didn’t make sense to me – less sense, even, than John’s call to tell me that Shawn was dead.

At Frank’s wake, on the 21st, a lot of people got up to tell stories. Frank’s family… his friends… his coworkers… And when NovySan got up to tell his stories (and out himself as the person one of Frank’s favorite stories was about), he said that Frank, more than anything, was a storyteller, and he asked everyone to keep their stories about Frank alive. Tell them to other people. Pass them around. Make sure that Frank isn’t forgotten.

I don’t have a lot of Frank stories. I only met him a few times – I doubt I spent a total of 10 hours in his presence. But he was a part of NovySan, and that makes him a part of me. I thought of him as a friend, and I always thought there’d be time enough to know him.

If Shawn’s death taught me anything, it should have been that there’s never enough time.

On the 17th, though, as NovySan was finalizing plans for our trip to Chicago for Frank’s wake, and I was sitting at this very table, trying to wrap up as much work as I could before we went, staring at a computer screen blurred through the tears (just as it is now), I did what I do when I feel frustrated and helpless – I went chasing stories.

There are a lot of stories about Frank online. The first one I found, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, might have been the most important. Several years ago, another member of a comic book forum to which Frank belonged died suddenly (and, like Frank, far too young). Frank, who lived near the funeral home, offered to take the board’s condolences to the family. Afterward, he submitted a full report. I won’t quote from it here, because the situation led to Frank being banned from the board in question (and I really have no desire to involve myself in whatever politics led to that decision), but if you follow the links, you’ll get a good sense not only of the controversy, but also of who Frank was.

That article at Comic Book Resources also led me to Imwan, which was Frank joined on Christmas Day 2006, and which became his undisputed online home. Imwan is where I found not only stories about Frank, but also stories by Frank. In The Writers’ Block, I found a story he’d written in grad school. I’d known Frank was a writer, but it was the first time I’d been able read something he’d written. And it’s good. It’s damned good. The formatting is important, as Frank noted. “It works perfectly in Word,” he said. It works perfectly in OpenOffice Writer, too – and I hope his family doesn’t mind, but I’ve uploaded a PDF version to prove it.

It’s been more than a month, and it still doesn’t make sense to me that Frank is dead. I’m grateful, though, that so much of him still lives online. His last post on Imwan, dated April 13, was a single word – Graphology. As last words go, that one’s not bad.