Steve Arndt

My Tribute from Last Night's Steve Arndt Coffee & Grief Reading

Last Night I was invited to read at Coffee & Grief’s first in person reading.

Here’s the piece that I read:

Steve Arndt was a car who kept bumping into me, on purpose.

Those black spectacles, his patient eyes waited for the good to come out of you, because he knew the good would come out of you at some point.

After the Bond days, after the drinks with the boys after work days. After that, Steve lived for rivers,words, water and connection.

He lived for that spontaneous moment when he could sprawl out on couch on the side of the road with a free sign on it, or whip his tie behind to pretend it got set in a door.

Letters, syllables, and the breath of before and after.

After Bonds, his mission was to bear witness to us, attentive, eyes on you, like they had been all along, no rush, no hurry, grace and a smile, To go to the writers picnic was to witness Steve running the numbers as to who should meet whom, to go to the Portland Book Festival was to Steve in the center of his hand-woven network of yarn that was spread all over the city to writers and readers, with threads passing through all of us here tonight. To be at Powell’s to be at Annie Bloom’s, to be at Salon Rouge, to be at Tom Spanbauer’s Table and Joanna Rose’s table, Or just being aware of all the differences in tone and hue words had. He could listen to words read by anyone. He’d find that thing that made writing special.

He didn’t just show up, he’d track down the writer afterwards, and compliment.

Your language

Your words

Your authority

So many times I’d see it.

First time reader, to hear that, and see the writer in them build their world out from that compliment, a new room of possibility opened up by one man, one heart.

ArndtHeart.

Steve would and could bring up a specific thing about your writing, or maybe it was how you quit booze and you got to tell Steve and you were let in to his club, of non drinkers, of AA work.

The world got a little more woo woo when he was around. He wasn’t a woo woo guy, but he sure attracted the woo woo, in me, in us, in everyone.Because for Steve, things like magic and love were all in abundance on this planet. The right frequency was always playing, Steve thought, one just had to tune one’s ear to hear the hidden music of the universe.

Steve, . If you didn’t understand him the first time you met him, you would eventually, he would see to it that he met everyone, would take them in, stop and listen to what they had to say. I was cynical and expected people to dish out harmful things with their words, I lived for fight or flight, so to see that all of the histrionics were from a man with a soft soul.

There was the macho side of him, but he did that gracefully if there was ever a word that he would accept on his own, surely that would be it. Adverbs.

Purple

Third Person

Step back and step up

You say that with such authority. Steve’d raise his left hand to make a point, Steve black framed classes in side profile.

“You’re a Spanbaurian. “

One of the last things he told me “Adam, I’d say you are a pretty extraordinary person”

We were in the hospital, his voice burned around the edges

Burned, like a tongue.

His Tongue, a talker

“She writes words like two kangaroos in a burlap sack

Your so pure adam, like a saint you are.

You make me feel soiled.

Oh the writer you’ve become and he’d go off, on a skip reverie, a performance of compliments, a bushel full, so much praise for so many people. Such was the delicate friend dance with Steve.

What he said and didn’t say.

What you’ve become.

What he’s become.

A way to be in the world.

Open, smiling, a tear and a word, the power always,

To listen

To the broken heart behind the words

in the way that only he could.

Steve, and who he was, the lil podnah to us all.