I was feeling very isolated and discouraged in fall 1969 when a postcard arrived -- 'Can I stay at your house next week, sunday, monday, tuesday? Love, Bob.' Bob Creeley was the first friend from out of town to visit me. He and I can sit for hours and talk and drink coffee. We have the same impulse to nail down, to assure ourselves of our places in our friends' hearts, to be sure that everything is all right, to be sentimental about place, where we grew up, locality. Family. We both like to define feelings, work around and around them, spend hours figuring out and laying out a relationship.
There are always two or three people who drop by my house when Bob is there, just because he's there. It happens so easily when he's there, putting another pot of coffee on, sitting at the kitchen table, hardly moving till late afternoon. I think of him as a pivotal person in the development of the Housebook, and for lack of another phrase, the Housebook style of my life. He made it easy for me to get a view of myself being this way and doing this particular thing, opening up to people. You can see -- tell -- looking at the pictures of him. Talking to Fanny Howe. To Robert Duncan. To Harry Rand. Bob has three children who live in or around Boston, and at least one of them comes by to see him, adding to the family atmosphere of his visits. When I took the portrait of him alone he was talking with his son Tom.
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