I miss Josh so tremendously already

I miss Josh so tremendously already. I am still angry that this should happen when he was just so happy with everything in his life. Had I been a better person I should just be appreciative of the luck it was that we ran into each other a bit over a decade ago.

Josh and Valerie

Because what luck was it that I as a philosophy student started taking neuroscience classes. Insane luck that I got a rare professor that not even liked my never ending line of outrageous questions, but who was so nonhierarchical and honestly curious that he decided we should make a topic list and start our very own two person philosophical neuroscience reading group. The meetings were awesome vexed and wonderful – but we started to spend more and more time also talking about things that were definitely not on our preplanned shopping list of mind mysteries to unravel.

We became very good friends. I stopped being embarrased when he asked questions about ingredients and preparation procedures for menu items that he did not want – sending know-nothing waiters on relay races to the back kitchen. The reading group meetings slowly dwindled to the occasional as the dinner parties, BAM visits and Brewster adventures took the center stage. I am at this point not really able to understand that it is all a time gone.

I don't know if it was Jonathans or Ofer's kids that before a party up in Brewster once asked "why can't Josh just make the food before we come like everybody else" - the answer of course is that Josh was not everybody else. He always loved the shared process more than the personal accomplishment or end result (- though these typically in Josh’s Labs were award worthy and very tasty). The journey of open-ended exploration, play and curiosity was rather serious business to Josh – something that in it self was a standard to live up to. I think Josh understood not only the living but life better than most.

Everything is temporary and in flux – it is the joys that we have on the road that counts. Most changes are effected without big splashes. And Josh lived such a rich life that intersected so many countless other lives – that the good news is that he will live on in all of us and all those that he touched who do not even know it.

What a lucky world that he was here – what a sad miserably difficult thing to say goodbye. 

Maria Brinker

Thank you Josh

I first met Josh at a friend's wedding about 15 years ago. We sat next to each other and had a grand old time and that was the beginning of our  friendship.  It was a Chinese wedding with a traditional Chinese banquet with all kinds of bizarre food - our zest for the food and interest in all the strange ingredients along with the conversation, the champagne and  the jollity of the occasion bonded us and we became good friends. Josh had a keen mind - very curious, witty, humorous - he had a twinkle in his eye and was always up for some teasing and sparring. He was interested in just about everything. He had a lot of insight into the foibles of humanity and a lot of compassion and empathy, too. I loved hearing him tell a story because he had interesting things to say about people and what made them tick . He was uniquely his own person , but what stands out is his character :  very very sweet, deeply intelligent, thoughtful, considerate, supportive, warm, present ; a good friend. I am grateful to have known Josh. His passing is a huge loss and a teaching to seize the moment and find time for those we love..   Thank you Josh for your dear presence in my life !

Hope Martin

Joshua!

I never understood how closely linked the practices of art & science could be until Josh gave me an admin job in his lab to help me out financially at a time when I was struggling, and I saw daily how he approached his work.  Actually, when I think about it, his lab closely resembles his kitchen in Brewster on July 4th:  the same outward appearance of complete unruly chaos and the same kind of collaboration & camaraderie from which would come, somehow, some amazingly successful results!  Perhaps that’s because Josh always brought the same creative energy & passion to living his life as he brought to his work.  It was all one for him.  Seamless.

Josh has been such a good, dear friend and I haven’t yet fully accepted that he’s gone.  So many memories compete for the telling.   But when I’m feeling particularly sad, I think of him, a week before he died, – I asked him if Valerie had been with him since he’d been out of the hospital, wondering if she’d gone back to LA at all for work, and he answered no, she’d stayed to be with him.  I said, "Boy, Joshua, did you luck out", referring to the fact that Valerie was so dedicated to taking care of him, words out of my mouth before I realized how that would sound in this situation.  He turned to me, a little off balance, skeletal in appearance, barely able to sit up without being nauseous, and slowly, with all the sincerity in the world, says, “Josie, I have been lucky in so many ways.”   And now, at this time in his life, he says, he felt so loved.  Well! Who could ask for more than that from life?  It was as if he was giving me a gift, leaving me with the knowledge of his happiness and evidence that his spirit was alive & well.  A generous friend to the end.

Thank you, Joshua, for enfolding me in your life as a friend and sharing so much of the fun of it with me.  I am all the richer for it.  I will carry you in my heart.  Love, Josie

All that Jazz

I met Josh as an undergraduate in the psychology program at City College. The rest, as they say, was history. There are two memories that stick with me more than anything else.

The first one was when Mark, he, and I were sitting around the lab table discussing a series of eye movement experiments. We had been sitting in silence for what seemed like years when all of sudden he and I--almost simultaneously--each burst out with an idea about where to go next with the experiments. It was then that I saw the sparkle in Josh's eye that I would come to know so well. I'll never forget that moment.

When I first started working in Josh's lab I would brag to the uninitiated, touting Josh to be the prototypical scientist. I would say, "If you knew him, then when someone said 'scientist', this man would come to your mind." I challenged others to show me someone who had more scientific integrity and more love of his or her craft than Josh. I don't think such a person exists.

The second was the mix of delight and surprise I remember feeling when at one of his (in)famous parties in upstate New York, he told me that I had just eaten some beef heart. Josh certainly knew his food and consequently opened up my palette. I also came to find out later that he and I shared a love of jazz and other types of eclectic music.

Josh, you will be sorely missed.

Some reminiscences

I knew Josh for at least 40 years, first as a colleague and friend. Not an intimate friend, but someone with whom I met regularly for breakfast, where he would casually prick whatever pretensions I had on offer that day, He loved to poke fun at my suburban life style, characterizing me as someone who was afraid to cross the Hudson river at night.  He came to our house once for Thanksgiving—surveying the chaos of family, friends and dog like an anthropologist in Papua—and leaving an indelible impression on my family.  He visited my daughter in Mexico City, and my Francophone granddaughter, who was then 6, and a little Lolita, remembers tto this day the visit of “le gentilhomme charmante barbué”. He was one of those rare individuals whose wit truly deserved the adjective “mordent”.

That Josh was a complex man goes without saying—his range of interests, like his circle of close friends, was extraordinarily large and unexpected—and when we would bump into each other at some odd place like the Film Forum he would give me a quizzical look as if to say,” what the hell are you doing here.”  He never quite convinced me to go to the Pima Bausch dance recitals—I am an old NYCB fan—but when she died, I was filled with regret that I had not taken his advice.

One of the things that drew us together was the fact that Josh shared with me the growing pains of the CUNY doctoral Program. It was the two of us that began the Neuroscience course that is now more than 30 years old, and worked together to manage the academic rivalries at Hunter and City to make our Training Grant work. He was always impatient with the absurdities of the academic administration and had only one goal—to be the best teacher and researcher he could be. And he was a phenomenal teacher. I have a distinct memory of his staggering into a Neuroscience lecture at City College at 9:00 AM; a bit sleepy and disheveled, with a paper cup of coffee in his hand-and then proceeding to deliver, for the next two hours, a carefully crafted, lucid and coherent lecture on the cerebellum—which made me feel that everything about this elusive structure had suddenly been made clear. That’s the image of Josh I will cherish. What I think I admired most about him was his passion for City College and his students. It was the passion of the nun for her vocation, of the dancer for her art. For me, that was his greatest gift to all of us.

Phil Zeigler

City and Hunter Colleges

A message to Josh's friends from Phil Bredesen

There will be a gathering of Josh's friends this Friday evening (March 9th) at the Harvard Club in New York  (35 West 44th Street).  It will begin at 6:00 pm and there will be a short program about 7:00pm.

Valerie has sent out email invitations to people that she knows were close to Josh.  If you're reading this, you're probably one of those.

She is concerned however that she has missed people.  The reception area is limited (50-70 people), and we're not broadcasting a general invitation.  But if you were a good friend of his and did not get an invitation, please come anyway; you'll be very welcome.  Similarly, if you know someone else who was a good friend but may have been missed in the invitation list, please let them know they'd be welcome.

Phil Bredesen

Bronx High School of Science

Yet more clippings from Josh's Bronx High School of Science years

Daniel Gardner

Science Survey (Student newspaper)
10 March 1961

ARVO Award

Josh was going to receive an award this May at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. From talking to him, I know that he was not looking forward to giving the obligatory lecture that accompanies accepting the award. He regarded these lectures as invariably self-congratulatory accounts of a series of research triumphs, something his fiercely honest and self-deprecating self found distasteful. Very sadly, the award will now be a posthumous one.

Richard Olivo

Much Aloha to Uncle Josh

Uncle Josh has been such an inspiration and has taught me such valuable lessons, simply displaying his deep connection to his soul. When I visited him a few weeks ago, despite the challenge of witnessing his physical discomfort, experiencing his deep calm and inner peace has been so gratifying. I returned from my visit with such a renewed vigor towards life, thanks to uncle’s beingness. I will always honor your love, compassion, humility, confidence, and the zest in which you approached life. You will be missed greatly, never forgotten, and your presence will certainly drive myself and many others to embrace the lives we are so fortunate to experience. Much Love!!

Your Nephew,

Gabriel 

We are so very lucky to have had him in our lives

I met Josh over twenty years ago via e-mail when a friend of his I knew who was describing him to me tired of my questions and impatiently gave me his address, saying, "Why don't you just ask him yourself?"

Soon afterward we met in person, and I loved him instantly.  Josh delighted in teasing his friends and I was no exception, especially once he realized how susceptible I was.  He never ran out of foibles, real or imaginary, to have fun with. I loved the way he called me "Roooooo-thie" in a baritonal sing-song, a swooping-up higher note to the lower one, that sometimes sounded a little like an Eleanor Roosevelt imitation. He could draw it out really long, or he could do the quick version. Sometimes it had a little rise at the end. The descending interval varied according to the situation, expressing a pending thought in need of completion, decisiveness, announcement, astonishment or disbelief, but generally amusement along with any of these. The ascending intervals of course signaled an upcoming question. He became "Joshie", as you might guess, and although that was a little harder to give the sing-song treatment to, I tried. How good it was to be enfolded in his hugs, what a pleasure it was when an e-mail from him would appear in my in-box or I would hear his voice on the phone. I felt completely understood and appreciated by him, as I think so many of his friends did. His lively concern for my well-being and happiness in my romantic and work life never flagged. We would happily garden side by side, making trips to the nurseries and weighing the merits of this or that plant, digging and hauling and weeding (he had no end of fun in accusing me of uprooting all his sorrel in one of my cyclone-like weeding frenzies) until we were fairly covered in dirt from head to toe. There were the wonderful meals in New York, where I learned to overcome my terror of fine dining through experiences where the food was outstanding but paled in comparison to the conversation. He liked all good restaurants, humble or fancy; but no restaurant was chic, trendy or elegant enough to make the slightest dent in the protective aura that surrounded me when I entered such a place with Josh. I doubt he so much as noticed the other diners, who depending on the place might be dressed to the nines unlike us; but he always felt perfectly at home, and therefore so did I.  Another friend has commented on his penchant for engaging waitstaff in the humorous, somewhat baroque Joshian style of extended comments and queries regarding the menu. These more often than not took a few elaborate twists and turns before their meaning, oftentimes quite a simple one, at last hove into view.  I often felt a subtle concern while this took place. I wasn't as sure as Josh seemed to be that the waitpersons in question would have the patience and openness to settle in for the quirky conversational ride which seemed to force them to depart slightly from the comfort of role.  But generally they did; and I can imagine, given what I suppose is the rarity of real interpersonal acknowledgment in such work, he was the highlight of the evening if not the workweek for quite a number of them.  Whatever we were doing at the time, I experienced perfect sympathy with this dear friend who had the ability to hear precisely what I meant and respond to it at levels far deeper than my words alone would have earned from anyone else I know.  This happened with no sense of effort, just the most relaxed observation and expression.  Conversation with Josh ranged far and wide, and I have not known anyone more comfortable to be with whether in talk or silence.  I never felt the need to measure my words or second-guess my manner of saying things with him, never felt judged in any way, and never felt the slightest tug to be something I wasn't.  I simply felt loved, 100%, by the most sympathetically insightful and caring and appreciative and goodnatured friend possible.  And it was mutual. We mattered to each other.  Josh was certainly a safe haven for me at the deepest level.    Meeting so many other terrific people who loved him and were loved by him was another great experience.  At his parties in Brewster, each of them somewhat different in feel, groups of his friends would be martialled by twos and threes to slice and cut and peel and chop, getting to know each other through easy conversation over shared work.  I can almost feel the summer sunlight pouring down, see the handthrown pottery he loved so much and the funky bright vintage ceramic serving dishes, mismatched and full of character, all loaded with colorful, delectable combinations of fresh ingredients following the latest offbeat recipes he had unearthed for the occasion. Exotic ingredients made appearances: corn fungus!, tomatillos, cactus leaves, Indian spices whose names I don't remember.  On the terrace overlooking the lake, meat and fish emerged smoky and gorgeous from the grill under his watchful care.  Long tables were cobbled together and covered with a motley assortment of tablecloths, benches and chairs were set up, and a happy crowd of people from the lab and elsewhere, from in town and away, people he'd known for 40 years and people he'd just met yesterday, sat down to eat and talk together. Josh had such a good-humored and easy way of making introductions and making everyone feel at home and then just setting them loose to have a good time; and the conversation with lovely, smart, talented and nice people from all sorts of backgrounds, individuals I would likely never have met otherwise, was a joy.  Even the cleaning up afterward was fun in this company.  The astounding thing is that in all this hubbub I never saw him stressed at any moment.  Everything unfolded as if charmed. I am thinking of all of us who knew and loved Josh, and truly I don't think it matters so much whether one knew him for decades or only a short time.  If you loved him, you loved him, period.  My sympathies and love to Valerie, Carl, and all of you near and far, too numerous to begin naming here, who held him dear and continue to hold him dear in spirit.  We are so very lucky to have had him in our lives. Ruth Libbey Cambridge, MA

Friends since we were thirteen

 Josh and I were friends since we were 13 years old and freshmen at the Bronx High School of Science. There is something very special about friendships made at that age. They endure through all of life's changes. 


I loved him dearly. Too sad to say much. I will always remember ....his wonderfully enquiring mind, his twinkling eyes, his great sense of humor, his laugh.... The time he showed up at my lab in Woods Hole (totally unexpected, he never did it any other way) and after a day at the beach, "kidnapped" me back to Boston....we were half way there before I noticed, I was so totally engaged in our discussion...how he laughed! So sad I never got to meet Valerie in time to see them together, so glad they found each other.  Friends are for ever and ever- 


Susi 
Susan R. Panny, MD 

Festschrift

Josh's arrival at his semi-official Festschrift (Purple Yam, Brooklyn, 6/8/2011)

I miss him profoundly

Josh—How sad I am that he is gone.  That I didn’t know him better.  Longer.

I am so incredibly sad that I will never again hear Josh’s laugh or hear his thoughts on some matter or other.  Be looked at by his twinkling eyes accompanied by his sweet & connected smile.

I miss him profoundly.

Sophie Molholm

My first art exhibition

I had my first art exhibition in New York in Jan 1995. Although the gallery had arranged for travel and transportation of the works of art, I did not have a place to stay. So, I spoke with my aunts, friends with Beate; she, as a friend of Josh, asked him for help and he offered me his back room in his cozy apartment in Soho.
After that stay, Josh used to remember this story every time we met and we both had a good laugh about it. The story goes like this: I got to NYC; it was a cold January morning; I stopped by Beate's place to pick up the keys of Mr. Josh Wallman's apartment. Josh was not in town at the time, he was supposed to come back in two or three days.

After he got back to his place, it took almost 5 days for us to meet face to face, although sharing the same place and bathroom....

I was working, he was working, I was out, he was in, he was in, and I was out... we were leaving notes for each other without even knowing each other’s face, until we finally met. He went to the opening of my show and we became good friends.

Sandra Tucci

A man who shared

I talked to Josh two days before his death to say Good Bye to a friend of over 30 years. And that conversation reminded me, again, of how much he was a man who shared. His resources, generously. His ideas, always. His friends, passionately. We often joked that in his previous life he must have been, if not a restaurant critic, a match maker. He found his own match, finally, in Valerie, who made him whole.

He also shared his love for the beauty of everyday birds and their community - and so I try to envision him sharing their freedom, his soul in soaring flight or swim, but surely in a gaggle, a host, a parliament, an exultation, a murmuration or a flock!

Friderike Heuer

I've known Josh since the 50's; how sad it is that he is no longer with us. The most important thing I can say about him is that for more than fifty years, he remained recognizably and celebratedly himself, so that the ebullient student was still evident in the somewhat-more-mature version my wife and I would run into at the Neuroscience and VisioNYC meetings, and Greenmarkets from Union Square to Seattle within the last year.

Complementing the Harvard picture, I provide Josh's entry in The Bronx High School of Science yearbook for the class of 1961.

...Daniel Gardner

I got to know Josh well some thirty years ago when he visited Oxford for an ornithological meeting in which I was not involved.  But he looked me up because of our common interest in eye movements.  Although we must have spent some time in the lab. what sticks in mind is the amount of time we spent talking about life and loves, and trying as many restaurants as possible.  

Over the years Josh became not just my friend, but my wife's friend and our daughters' friend - and last year our older daughter took her boyfriend to meet Josh too!  In the summer of 2002 Josh joined us (myself, my wife, and then 16 and 8 year old daughters) in a memorable trip round China.   Josh had a neck-cooler that was a sausage-like object that seemed generally to be in use cooling our eight year old's neck rather than Josh's.   Food was of course a major part of the experience.  Josh relished experiences as various as the night-markets where we were offered such delicacies as scorpion kebabs, and a splendid banquet Josh arranged in a house in the old city with a descendant of the Imperial food-taster.   We had only one Chinese speaker amongst us (my wife) and towards the end of the trip she decided to go on strike and left Josh and I to fend for ourselves.   We strolled along the Beijing street looking for interesting restaurants we had not already sampled and settled on one. The waitress showed us to a table and handed us menus in Chinese.   An awkward delay followed until she said in halting English "You need help, Sirs?"  "We need help"; we said "What are your specialities?"  "Ah Sirs", she said, "We special fish-head restaurant; only serve fish head."  So fish-head it was, complete with an explanation of the correct sequence in which to eat the various parts, leaving the choice delicacy - the eye - to last.  I confess we did not eat the eyes, and probably not only because it seemed improper to consume the subject of one's research!  

We miss greatly his kindness, his quick mind, his terrific enjoyment of many subjects, his openness, and his ability to talk share deeply of himself.   He loved banter, but could also be intensely serious.  He had a deep aversion to lies, and once told me with great earnestness  "Love is not a feeling".  One of the most poignant aspects of his last year were to see the complete trust and confidence he had in Valerie as he and she travelled this most difficult of paths together, and the huge love between them.   Her loss is of course the greatest of all.

Stuart Judge

I first encountered Josh as a PhD student in his Neuroscience class at the Graduate Center. I knew that Josh was no ordinary instructor as soon as he pulled out the camera. He said something about his interest in perception and then asked if he could photograph each of us, the entire class, one by one. I don't know what, if anything, he ever did with those pictures, but it set the tone of the class and was the perfect introduction to Josh. I think students had mixed feelings about how Josh taught; felt uneasy about his unwillingness to give traditional lectures or to focus on letting you know 'what you need to know'. For the student who wanted to be engaged, Josh was great. I loved when he held out a piece of chalk to a student struggling with a concept and invited them to come up and illustrate their understanding on the board. Those were the best moments to me - not because I learned the most, but because you could see how excited he was to engage with his students at that level, and that got you excited. After that class if Josh offered a seminar, I enrolled. It didn't matter if it was relevant to my work or was a current interest of mine. I knew that, through Josh, I'd be exposed to ideas I'd not considered and a way of seeing the world that I wasn't capable of generating on my own.



My history with Josh wasn't as long as most of the people writing here, nor was my relationship nearly as close. Josh was an important figure in my life nonetheless - I considered him a mentor and an inspiration. I had enormous admiration for his ability to see what other people gleamed over. He saw all the interesting parts when other people saw the gestalt. I remember how struck I was walking along 34th St. with him, from the Graduate Center on 5th Ave to the subway at 6th Ave., as our conversation was constantly interrupted by his observations of strange window reflections and visual illusions. It was his way of seeing and his love of engagement (both social and intellectual) that led me to ask him to serve on my thesis committee in spite of the complete lack of connection between his research and mine. I wanted him there because I thought he'd push me to think more creatively and ask more interesting questions than I otherwise would. And I knew he'd tell me the truth about my work.

It was clear to me that Josh lived to engage, and I cherished the times that that engagement was with me. Though that was infrequent compared to others, I loved it because his energy gave me energy. Josh's excitement (about food, people, ideas, experiences) was contagious. I hope that when I forget to look for the interesting things around me I'll remember to ask myself, "what would Josh see?"

-- Wendy Friedman

ps. I found these great photos on-line. At first I wasn't sure they were Josh, but as I studied them closely the posture and hand positions were unmistakable!

Okay, so chipping in with my pound's worth, for the moment I am one of the younger generation of Josh's friends, having known him for "only" 24 years, in fact since the Retinal Degenerations satellite meeting in Banff, Alberta. A chance encounter - in Calgary airport, hoping to bump into someone who could help me get to this lost place, I vaguely remembered his face from the main ISER conference in San Francisco and dared ask if we might share a hired car - and with his signature kind of bemused slightly shocked expression he acquiesced. Albeit from very different backgrounds, we spotted a moose along the way, and it was quickly clear we were both nature lovers. As luck would have it we were a day early for the meeting, isolated in the Canadian Rockies, and managed to get some construction workers to give us a ride up the mountain in the back of their pick-up. And thus began our endearing friendship, surrounded by wilderness and bighorn sheep. We both quickly recognised each others irreverent (somebody else used this word to describe him, very true) attitudes, and spent the Banff meeting making little innocent digs at each other. We were already confident enough in our relations to risk personal matters - I remember the disco night when we were sitting drinking a beer watching a quite provocative blonde german lady get down on the dance floor. Josh turned to me and said "Do you think if I asked her for a dance she would tell me to get lost?". I slowly looked her up and down, then looked Josh up and down, and softly said "yes". We both burst out laughing.

As I said, very different upbringings - him the quintessential New Yorker, me the backstreet Londoner but also voluntarily exiled to France. We saw each other on average once a year, sometimes more, sometimes less, generally at one of the vision conferences, either the regular ARVO or the irregular (in geographic terms) ISER. As already pointed out by his many other friends, his obsession with good food led us to many wonderful eating experiences, like tasting bear stew in Helsinki. Or home-made panna cotta near Lake Cômo in Italy. Or barbecued baby back ribs in Fort Lauderdale. I had the privilege of staying often at his apartment in the Village, and once visiting Brewster for a week-end to clean up the garden. Josh always made every effort to make me feel at home, once he got tickets to a new Carolyn Carlson performance - only problem was I just stepped off the plane from Europe and was really tired and jet-lagged, trying to keep my eyes open as we watched this very slow-moving and actually very dull show. We joked about this time on so many occasions, somehow he actually seemed embarrassed about having made me suffer when it was pure kindness on his part.

Many things will remain confidential, as personal memories should. But I am sure many people will remember his odd walk, rather disarticulated like he had to consciously think to get all the parts moving together. And his habit of calling friends by their family names - there was "Mertz", and there was "Hicks" (that's me). And his favourite word, which I often impersonated, "a-MAZ-ing". We all seem to agree, a wonderful warm-hearted, unassuming unpretentious generous man. A part of my pleasure in life has vanished with his passing, and I know ARVO will never be the same again. An a-MAZ-ing guy.

Remembering Josh

I apologize for leaving you all with rambling memories in need of editing. I wrote this on Sunday, the morning after getting the woeful news.  I apologize, too, if my account seems long-winded, but, I apologize, yet again, for its brevity, for I could write oodles more about my beloved friend whom I will miss terribly.

I've known Josh since the early 70's.  I met him through his brother, as my ex-boyfriend and Carl had been roommates at the University of Wisconsin.  Carl had a farm in New Hampshire and Peter and I would visit.  One visit, Carl's brother came up from New York in his MGB.  Though immensely professorial in his demeanor and left-brain dominated, he just had a thing for fast cars.  His last, an Acura he bought second hand, had been fitted with the most earbending and road shaking turbo charge.  He loved to take off, accelerating with great alacrity at the turn of a green light near his second home in Brewster and watch as startled would-be drag challengers pulled up to the Acura, steal a sidelong glance at its driver, blink in a double-take of surprise and disappointment when they found at the wheel a 60ish bald and bespectacled clone of Salman Rushdie and Oliver Sachs.

When we first met, he had just moved to the City from Cambridge, having accepted a teaching position at CCNY.  (Or, was it Rutgers?)  Peter and I found him jovial and easy to be around that weekend, and that was that.  Until, about a week later, we were going to have a meal at our favorite restaurant in Chinatown and ran into Josh with a number of friends.  I’d learn later that this was Josh’s preferred mode of travel: en masse.  We exchanged pleasantries, and, again, that was that.  After about another week, Peter and I were having dinner at Victor's Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side, and whom should we run into, but Josh.  We knew then that the friendship was sealed and made in foodie heaven.  Josh’s first New York apartment was on MacDougal Street above the landmark Village coffee house, La Lanterna.  By an ironic coincidence, I was at the Lanterna yesterday at the very moment when he died, after not having frequented the café for 10 years or more

.

He moved to Carmine Street shortly thereafter where he lived until his passing, and, since I was on Sullivan, he and I became really close, in the beginning bonding over food mostly.  Josh was an immensely generous person, with his money, his time, his friendships.  He'd take me to the best restaurants in town just because he wanted to experience them, or have me get to know his favorites.  A year or two into our friendship, we'd begun to meet every Saturday morning at the old Soho haunt, the O.G. Dining Rooms.  I'd bring my dream journal and we'd analyze my dreams of the past week while he'd develop a crush on every new waitress in their employ.  In the end the sessions became reciprocally therapeutic because we’d also get to analyze why he had a penchant for falling for waitresses, women there to serve, i.e., take care of him.  That’s not to mention that these pretty young things were also usually clad in mini-skirts.

Early on in our friendship, Josh engineered a friendly rivalry over which one of us was the “quintessential New Yorker.”  Ground Zero for him was Madison Avenue in the 60’s, and for me, the Bronx.  We liked to point to the other’s creds as proof that the other was the epitome of a New Yorker.  Flash points were, of course, restaurants and food shops, ethnic neighborhoods, an inconsequential clutter of trivia.  Josh not only won, against his protests, of course, but Josh embodied New York, and all the sophisticated and funky things that make this city probably the most engaging in the world.

I remember innumerable meals with him when the restaurant’s proprietor would find us, pull up a chair and take time to chat, either because Josh had barraged the wait staff with questions they couldn’t answer, or he wanted to, diplomatically of course, offer a menu suggestion, or because he’d already established a relationship with that owner. Often times, during these chats, in his always-humble way, he would demonstrate that he was more knowledgeable about the establishment’s cuisine, invariably “ethnic,” or international, than even the owner.

 

I especially loved eating with him at Pao, an exceptionally good Portuguese restaurant in SoHo, where he’d spend a good part of the meal shooting the gastronomic breeze with Frank, one of the owners.  One night, when Joe and Josh and myself were enjoying dinner, and after I’d returned still glowing from my first trip to Portugal, with the help of a good bottle or two of Alentejo wine, we three proposed a trip to the lovely waitress as a foursome. The fantasy lived on with us until Joe’s death.

He got to know a number of my boyfriends and was always available to listen to my relationship problems, offering advice, some of which was right on-target and insightful.  I’d reconnected with a long-lost boyfriend from my undergraduate days at City.  And we became friends.  I just knew that he and Josh would hit it off.  They did, over food and wine, of course, and discovered they were born on the same day, same year.  It was, as all who knew him know, the 4^th of July.  Joe was African-American, though quite light-skinned, and they took to having it on with all they’d meet, passing themselves off as twin brothers.  Some years back, Joe lost his job and, sick with prostate cancer, could not find employment.  Josh “loaned” him I don’t know how many thousands of dollars knowing, but not letting on, that he’d never get it back.  When Joe became really sick, he went out to California to stay with his sister.  Just before Joe died, Josh flew me out there so that I could be with them both and reconnect with Barbara whom I hadn’t seen since she was a child.  Sadly, Joe died a day before I arrived.  Josh came up from LA where he was visiting Valerie to be with Barbara and me in our grief.

When Valerie came into his life, she immediately also came into ours, “ours” meaning all those many, many people whom Josh touched.  He seemed to bring countless numbers of folks, of good folks, into both his professional and personal orbits; usually spun in tandem.  The last I saw Josh alive, just a week before he died, he took me aside while Valerie was in the kitchen and marveled at how well Valerie meshed with all his friends.  I knew how important that was for him and how it made him love Valerie even more.

When the recession hit and I lost nearly all of my writing sources, over dinner one night at an inferior Mediterranean place on the Upper West Side, he offered me a once-a-week gopher kind of job at his lab.  I'm still there.  And now, he's not.

Carolina Amoruso