In a few years I will have to leave my apartment for decades – my landlords have been great – but they are getting older and need my space. Thanks to them I have had a great place at a very reasonable rent. I have had my most creative and productive years in this flat. So, I am starting to downsize. My landlord and I will take down this large table that has been a bulwark in my living room and has accumulated all kinds of stuff, one friend opined, “Your apartment is a throwback to an old Greenwich Village Bohemian, a museum of Doug Holder.” My flat has books littered all around it, artwork, antique furniture, the severe bust of Dante staring at me every morning, a large framed photograph of the old elevated tracks above Harrison Ave. in Boston, the ashes of my late wife, a row of framed photos of my beloved cats who passed over the years, awards, stacks of the magazines and newspapers where my work has appeared, pictures of my late father with Jack Dempsey and Yogi Berra.

There are pictures of peddlers from the Lower East Side, who are frozen in a perpetual pose, hawking knishes, men’s wear, Sig Klein’s fat man shop, with a fat man in large white underwear in the store’s window, there is a fit for every man. I am looking at a painting of Toots Shore, the venerable NYC bar/eatery of yore, with a signature from Joe DiMaggio, an ashtray from the Stork Club … In a way, that bulwark of a table seemed to keep me rooted in the past – it held things together – but as I have learned in life, all things must pass. Eventually you have to let go. I don’t think I will ever have a place that I loved so much, a dark refuge, a beaten couch listening to jazz every evening, the tapestries, the Chinese calligraphy, a lot of things will go the way of all things – to dust. I am probably going to have to move from Somerville as the rents are outrageous …  but the years I spent here, the work I have done, my love will always remain … Slowly I will downsize, like we all do, whether body or home, and in the end as Shakespeare wrote in the Seven Ages of Man, “Sans Everything.”