An Ed Lowe Story

by: Joan Hitz

Dear Readers,

From May through October of 2010, I was supremely fortunate to share an active e-mail correspondence with Ed Lowe. It meant (and still means) the world to me. When Ed died a little over a year ago, Long Island lost a great storyteller and legions of people lost a dear family member and friend. The South Bay’s Neighbor was the last publication to carry Ed’s work. I wrote this piece shortly after he died, and I share it here in honor of him. Joan Hitz

An Ed Lowe Story     

Ed Lowe. I wasn’t exactly hot on his trail, but I was on his trail. I wasn’t following him, but I followed him. I’d lived on his street, worked in his building, and he’d sat on my lap for thirty years in parking lots all over Long Island. Okay, that was a cheap shocker. I hope it provokes laughter behind the swinging doors of whatever cosmic bar room he’s in.

But it’s also true: for three decades, while indulging my habit of sitting in the car with the newspaper spread over my legs, I read Ed’s columns. And I often thought, “I really ought to know that guy.” Then I’d turn the page.  

Then one Saturday last May (2010), on a break from yardwork, I sat under a tree and read Ed’s column about ... letters unwritten. “I ought to know that guy,” I thought (italically). 

So in a skip-the-yardwork trance, I entered the house, fixed a salad, and finally wrote to Ed. By the time I’d finished (a letter I deemed long enough to make up for thirty years), the salad was in wilt.  

I hit ‘send’ and went to my niece’s communion.

That night, when I logged back on to the computer, there was Ed Lowe in my inbox. 

He’d read my letter four times (six, he said, if he counted the interruptions, which he now called ‘godblessed’ instead of goddamned. Since his stroke, Ed counted everything, even interruptions, as events to savor.).

Ed also said he liked writing to someone who, like him, enjoyed going off on tangents. 

And then he stranded me on one.

My first e-mail from Ed Lowe ended unsigned, and with only half a sentence. He left me dangling with the pronoun “I.”

I ... what?  

Well, I thought, only half his body works (the other half affected by the stroke), so why not a partially-paralyzed e-mail too? The first half on time, the other limping in on a delayed schedule ... 

As this was Ed, I chose to wait. As this was Ed, my patience was a fake. 

All Sunday, between uninspired bouts of yardwork, I checked the computer for the words that should follow that “I.” For fourteen days, I waited for the AWOL verb of Ed Lowe. It never came, so finally I broke down and wrote again.

You left me dangling, I told him, for a fortnight in Tangentia. I ended my letter with wicked glee: I must conclude this follow-up e-mail by simply stating that I

Then for the second time ever, I hit ‘send’ to Ed Lowe.

All I wanted was the second half of my first half-a-letter. But this time he wrote me back a whole one.

A love letter. 

Now, hang on. It was the kind of love letter you write to someone you don’t know, offering up a universal sort of love: “I wish for you to fall in love,” the letter said, “with your book-in-progress, with another soul, with yourself ...” It was signed this time: Ed Lowe.

Well. Ought-to-know-that-guy became must-know. Like a shy stranger with a predestined appointment to see the king, I began to pace along the cyber-moat in front of the castle door (e-mail address) of Ed Lowe, throwing tiny pebbles, afraid to really knock. 

I couldn’t help it - all through June, I e-mailed him again and again, till finally, he actually asked me to: “Keep writing to me, for both our sakes.”

And that’s how, during Summer 2010, I sat in front of a computer and got to know that guy. Back and forth along an electronic cosmic footpath, I banged out letters and Ed zipped them back.  

All July and August we mingled at a word party, two writers romping through the funny, deep, and whimsical. We exchanged anecdotes. We sent stories. We brokered mutual encouragements too. 

Ed poured his benediction, “Holy (Unprintable)!” over a story I’d sent (I’ve memorized that e-mail), and I pleased him with a fabrication of a stroll he might one day take, talking shop with Mark Twain. 

And I began to realize something. I’d always been a writer but I’d never considered just where it might lead. Now, I knew. Writing with Ed Lowe revealed me to myself. Just like him, I wanted to do a column too. It called to me like nothing before.

And then ... his September column: The Liver.

When Ed wrote me about his cancer diagnosis, I was so crushed I told him I wasn’t going to sleep that night. Later that evening he wrote again to say: “If it wasn’t for these (post-stroke) 2 1/2 years, we would have never met. I’m tired,” he said. “You be tired too.” 

With this through-the-screen shoulder squeeze, I knew that whatever happened, the going on of days was the thing. The going on of days.

Condensing the uncondensable, Ed had surgery, began chemo, and got too sick to write. I’d been ready for that - to enter a dark place of unknowing - and all November and December, I endured it. During long days of a quiet inbox, I prayed for him, hoped he’d rally and that we’d get to connect again. 

The end of this story is longer, but the crux of it is this: I still had something to say to Ed - the giant beautiful goodbye I’d never have sent when he was newly diagnosed and trying for a cure. 

Now, I wasn’t sure I’d get to do that. And that tore at me.

Then one day in late December, a series of events unrolled with a crystalline clockwork that convinces me the universe writes poems. Without any planning, everything proceeded like a well-wrought movie script.

Hit with the sudden sense that there wasn’t that much time, I wrote a letter to Ed’s daughter, Colleen. That summer, he’d sent me her e-mail address, though I’d never used it.

The letter I wrote to Colleen was the one I meant for Ed. Could she read it to him, please? She wrote back immediately to say that, remarkably, she was driving down from out of state to visit him the very next day.

Three days later, Colleen read my letter to Ed. In it, I revealed that the correspondence had been so much more than just that. I’d saved everything - printed out the entire cyber-exchange onto a thick stack of real, permanent paper. 

Dear Ed, my letter began, your heart is a star and you used it that way  ...

Colleen said he leaned back and listened, a “satisfied small smile on his face.” 

I can see that small smile. And “small” isn’t small at all. I’m honored. For thirty years, Ed Lowe wrote a “small” column. Limited by page space to approximately 1000 words, Ed had the incredible gift of tucking big-hearted stories about “small” people into a few “small” paragraphs. Very big indeed.

Ed knew what the really big stories were, and who the really big people were. Not the “super”heroes, “big” names and “super”stars; not the car accidents and fires and wars. 

Just ... us. Long Islanders with big lives lived on a small daily basis. In the small print.

So I’ll take that “small smile.” I’ll follow that unseen small smile into eternity.

Eleven days later, on January 15, 2011, Ed died.

And like the past-my-due-date procrastinator I was born to be, the day after his death, I got a stirring to return to Hamilton Street in Amityville, the place where he’d grown up and I’d once spent a year.

You see, I’d been following Ed, cold on his trail, for decades. When I was 22 years old, I spent a year living on Hamilton Street, but I’d never searched him out. And I now worked in the same school building where for two years in the 1960s, Ed taught English. 

So, in grief, and needing to do something, I decided to see his house, and where it was, in relation to the house I’d lived in. Were they close? How close?

I drove up the street to the cape I’d lived in - number 37. Surely, number 57, Ed’s house, would be much further up, very far away. But, as sometimes happens in strangely-house-numbered suburbia, the number gap didn’t reflect a space gap.

A roll of the tires and there it was - 57 - Ed’s childhood home. Same side of the street, three doors away. The lawn was covered in a thick blanket of clean untrodden snow. I gave my own small satisfied smile. I was now hot, but still cold, on his trail.

Across from my old house was an opening onto a canal. At 22, I’d stand there and gaze at the sky, searching for my future. Now, at 48, I simply gazed into today. 

Down the length of the canal stood rows of weathered pilings, free of boats for the winter. The water shifted with floating rectangles of light, and before me, the sun lit a tiny green sparkle in an oil slick. It winked at me ... and I spoke.

Into the ever-present, ever-receding sky, I lofted the name of the Long Island storyteller and man I’d ought to, and had come to, know. “Ed Lowe” ... I felt his name sail out and mingle with the air currents of the Great South Bay. I wanted the winds of Amityville to keep a part of him close, forever.

The last words Ed ever typed to me were ‘thank you,’ and the last word I ever typed to him was ‘peace.’  

Those words are universal, they are interchangeable, and they are prayers. I’m still saying those prayers. I’m still praying for Ed. I’m not planning to stop.

(first published on January 25, 2012, in South Bay's Neighbor News)