This photograph was taken at Bob’s 60th birthday party in July of 2005. I like it because in it, he is both delighting and delighted, relaxed and surrounded by people he loved. Below is an ode, woefully clumsy, I’m afraid, in which I tried to toast him the manner that he toasted others.

A welcome to all who’ve assembled today
To honor His Badness, Madame Blobovsky, some would say
For he’s turning the corner and entering a new decade
With a head full of hair and a spiked lemonade
Well it’s no easy feat to be toasting this man
Who could talk a cold Yeungling right out of its can
He is sweet and he’s gentle, but there’s a gleam in his eye
It’s a devious impulse that keeps you up late at night
He’s become somewhat famous in circles like these
For what he expounds upon and for what he believes
For long invocations and his tales from the morgue
His tracts about McTaggert & and of course Swedenborg
In whose poems the children of Chestnut Hill delight
Affording their poor harried parents a break on that night
In October, at the library, on the hill where he works
And on breaks, between cigarettes, he composes his verse
Oh he thrills us, nearly kills us every Halloween eve
While he double entendres and he laughs in his sleeve
When we hear him, we smile, for his words send us reeling
At images of blood and of skin that is peeling,
And eyeballs in soup spoons and brains all congealing
And fat men throwing hairpieces up at the ceiling
For that is the hand that his Badness is dealing.
He is special and I’m not just referring to words
He once wrote an ode to a punchbowl with turds
He’s a musician who serenades us with airs and fine jigs
He converses at busstops with old dandies and prigs
He can sling insults in matches with the sharpest of tongues
One lady has informed me that he is quite competently hung
A blazing intellect even after seventeen beers
He reads like fish and remembers everything he hears
He has friends who all love him and know him to be
The kindest and most loyal of friend you would need
I will end with a claim that requires no struggle
He is the only man among us with balls he can juggle.