I met Harry Snyder when I was about seventeen. I’d been working at a family restaurant called Edibles and a bagel place called Kupel’s—both on Harvard Street, near Coolidge Corner. I was a miserable high-schooler. The jobs were an escape and a relief.
I don’t recall who told me they were looking for help at the movie theater. It was a place I’d loved ever since we moved to the area in 1978. The Coolidge was an old movie palace struggling to stay afloat after the advent of video-cassettes in the mid 80s. Before that, it was a thriving repertory house, with different themed programming for every day of the week. Now it had to compete for artsy and foreign new releases with corporate chains.
I took a pay cut to work there but somehow knew instinctively that it would be more valuable in the long run than a few extra bucks an hour. The staff was a mix of recent art and film school grads, a few unaffiliated misfits, and a sprinkling of angry, strange high-schoolers like me.
I didn’t find out Harry was a painter until several months working at the theater. He had an art opening at a little gallery in Fort Point Channel. I went and bought a drawing of dense, dark trees. It’s one of only two or three pieces of art I’ve paid for to this day.
Harry and I didn’t talk much about art over the thirty-five-plus years of our friendship but he showed me how to carry myself in the world without neurotically making sure anyone who crossed my path knew of my “true calling”. He was a fully-rounded person first but an artist to the core, nonetheless.
Harry died in December and I traveled to Massachusetts last week for a memorial at the Quaker meeting house where he and his wife Amy have been members for many years.
I knew almost no one else in the overflow crowd that packed the open, sunlit room of benches set up facing one another in the middle, rather than toward a priest or pulpit. People got up to share their memories of Harry, then sat back down and waited until someone else was moved to rise and talk. I’m not much for organized religion but this was far preferable to any other faith gathering I’ve ever attended.
The next day, Amy and I went through a couple flatfiles full of Harry’s drawings and ephemera to begin figuring out what to chuck and what to keep. In one manila folder I found a few stapled notepad pages in my own handwriting. They were notes from the few months in 1995 when I worked with Harry at Lifeline, the medical panic button service. My job was to drive to poor neighborhoods, knock on doors, and change batteries on the units. I had to write up the conditions I found at each visit.
Grigsby, Unit 1050, 15 Nightingale, Dorchester—How old is this lady? She was really sweet, but seemed to be barely holding on.
Bishop, Unit 1010, Roxbury—Her mind is shot, does not wear beeper.
M.Brackeen, Unit 1003, 333 Mass—Nice woman, asked how you were, seemed a lot less bitter about life than a lot of them.
I remember I’d applied for a full-time position with Lifeline but didn’t get it. I went back to driving cab, then moved to Chicago for good in 1997. I made a point of seeing Harry and Amy on most visits east to see my parents thereafter.
Harry’d been sick for many years so his passing was not a surprise. The last time I saw him—in the new house in Framingham where Amy and I were now going through his art and papers—he was in bad shape. He held on a lot longer than I would have. As he told Amy days before the end, he really liked being alive.
I’ve known few people in my life who loved living more.
The Moby Dick preorder is live. I dedicated the book to Snyder’s memory. He wouldn’t’ve been out of place on the Pequod.
