The first photo here is of a long table in the main room of Lax’s house on Patmos and the wall above it, where he taped photographs, cards and children’s drawings sent to him by friends and strangers. He said once that all of the things up there told him to put them there. He used the room this table and wall were in for most activities, including sleeping and entertaining guests.
On the table itself, you can see a stack of the notebooks Lax used for jotting down poems and observations, a large supply of airmail envelopes for the many letters he wrote, and the pens he used to make drawings and yellow dots for friends. The blue denim coat in the foreground and the straw hat to to the left were regular garb when he went down into town.
The wall items are a bit hard to discern but they include an icon of St. John the Theologian (a copy of which hangs above my own writing desk), a pontillist painting of a circus, two cards with images of St. John on Patmos, and a photograph that might be of Jack Kerouac. The items stretched much further down the wall and across the next wall to the left. When you sat in that room and talked with Lax, you had the feeling that you were surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.
The second photo is of a poster that hung in Lax’s entryway in later years, just inside the frosted glass door. The words on it capture the feeling during summer days when friends of all kinds streamed in and out.
