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ISSUE:  Summer 1994
Whether or not they moved into a blue clapboard duplex
in their mid-thirties, Ted and Tina—
clapboard?—bringing three bicycles
and the case of Bordeaux given them years before
by Uncle James who said as if he knew what was to come
“This will refine your thoughts” and
five mirrors and five small boxes of old letters
(Ted: three; Tina: two), Tina insisting
the sand-colored carpet must be professionally cleaned
at a cost which Ted called “really absurd”;
and whether as a result of the new location
Tina met a young Irish theorist at a reading psych.
  conference
who introduced her and Ted to the artist Ted would call
the Rembrandt of the Eighties whose talk apparently
precipitated Tina’s essay “Eidolons and the Muser’s Eye”
it seems certain that in that period one action pointed
to another
otherwise
Ted’s friend Alberto two years later might not have written
what he wrote about his mother (the painter) dying
  including
the beautiful “sand between our toes” passage
which Ted more than once read aloud in the International
  House
of Pancakes to among others R. Glenn Paul the budding
Spenser scholar who pined for Tina till 1990 swearing
only she enabled him to see
and Jayne Alice Orson the imminent star of the purple
  movie
“Ardalion and Lydia” which won a small obsessive
  audience
for director Lona Moseley throughout the decade and
  caused
both Ted and Alberto’s brother Juan the accordionist
to lie sleepless many nights or ride bicycles till dawn—
a web of truth stretches among these facts surely
and if this web does not shine importantly
then everything is too sad; hence our research.
Some sources say it was in fact at Cafe Budapest
that Ted recited Alberto’s page about the shadows at
  midnight
in Memorial Hospital and the waitress allegedly proposed
to marry him (Ted? or Alberto?) on the spot. There was
an intensity, an atmosphere in which each minute counted,
almost a chemical glow around their heads. . .
Why did Tina leave Ted? This we can’t know
till the green box is opened, but the web already shines for
  us
under the moon-like light of inquiry, as we note for
  instance
that when Ted joined the Garcia group late in ‘87
young Lloyd Zebrun had not yet departed and was just on
“the maddening edge” of composing the end of That
  Lingering Smoke.

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