It was an especially contemporary experience, and an unpleasant one, to learn of the death of my friend Doug on Twitter.

The backstory: Doug went into the hospital at the end of summer suffering from multiple complaints. As the weeks passed he came out of intensive care, then out of the hospital itself to rehab, in order to relearn walking. He had no smartphone in any of these places, and we kept in touch via his family. After the turn for the worst, the sister who lives in the same house as he did came to ours with the news, but found it dark: We had gone to the city. She did not have our phone number there (why should she, since in the country we lived over the hill?). The ex-husband of another of his sisters tweeted a farewell, linking to a piece I wrote about him here (March 24, 2014). Some­one who follows both of us tweeted condolences to my small screen.

So came the news, via the forum of pet videos and vituperation, though why should that be any worse than coming upon an obituary in the newspaper? Worse than the form of transmission is guilt over not having been by his side. Worse than that is the conviction of im­potence in the face of the event, even if I had been Jonas Salk. Worst is the loss.

Anyone who has a house in the country has a fixer, or an army of fixers, and the country our house is in is filled with soi-disant artistes, some of whom actually are. In Doug the combination was unique. Wiring, painting, building a closet, a bridge, a raised garden bed, cleaning out the gears of a 60-year-old four-blade metal table fan, all these were no problem for him, and probably would not be for a number of hardworking patient men. Not many shared his sense of style. My wife wanted a dining-room table, and she had two requirements: It would be wood, and it should not have an apron, the frame that lies below the surface providing structural support. Doug thought, worked, and made a slab of cherry, resting on splayed legs. The edges of the top were natural; he dropped in a butterfly to stabilize a crack. The legs made an X beneath the cherry; from the floor they looked caught in mid stride. Above, it was outdoors-brought-indoors, poet at a tea ceremony; below, it was form as function, furniture of the future, c. 1920. Doug burned his name on one end. The first time we dinted the surface, he said not to worry, the mark made a story.

Another time my wife wanted to frame a botanical print of a pine bough with long, thick cones (the particular pine was identified as living in “Algérie”). Doug had some chestnut wood to work with. American chestnut trees have not grown to maturity since the blight struck them early in the last century. They are not extinct; you can find chestnut shrubs in what once were chestnut/oak forests, sprouting from old roots — Doug came upon them now and again — but before long a canker develops and kills them. You can still retrieve the wood though from old barn doors. Doug had enough for a frame, and of course he placed a knot where the largest cone in the print almost touched the edge. Old America, meet old Algérie.

He loved to tell stories, and loved telling the same ones, which was fine because they were good stories. He once prepared for a date at the reservoir by fitting a tray on the dashboard of his car, for wine and cheese. In mid meal a mouse crept out of the car’s innards to join the young romantics. I hope the girl was smart enough not to be put off by a mere intruder. His sense of humor was — special. His seasonal cards were all labeled Not in the Ground Yet Graphics. I remember a Christmas card whose theme was static electricity. A fearful Santa Claus trembled as his eyebrows and beard slowly met over his face.

He told me once, the world is chaos, we have to create beauty. His first statement is at least half wrong: The world creates beauty; it created him. We feel it to be chaotic because of its prodigal indifference to what it creates. Gone we’re gone, the world rolls on.

One of Yeats’s last poems is called “Beautiful Lofty Things,” a recollection, in his old age, of people — friends, his father, a lover — who were important to him, and it ends with the bold line, “All the Olympians, a thing never known again.” This is an assertion of a religious belief — theosophical, or Christian (if we translate Olympian as immortal). But what, faith aside, is immortal about half a dozen people whom nobody outside of Ireland, and tiny slices of college literature departments, has ever heard of? And what is — was — unique about them? Yeats’s statement can be justified perhaps thus. Ideas are real, as are things. Two is real; so is 2 + 2 = 4. So are statements and descriptions. Any single trait of ours might be shared with -illions of others, living, dead, and to come. But the combination of myriad traits that is your-/myself is unreproducible. Hence unique, and — since an idea once formulated cannot be unmade — immortal. Not that that helps the plunging patient on his sickbed, or his bereaved family.

Doug’s taste in music was, to my ears, like his sense of humor. He loved Meat Loaf. He would come rolling up the driveway in his van, windows down, blasting some out-there hit. As he aged, he would prop open the car door with a golf club, some number iron. Then he would hand over the thing he had repaired, or some muffins he had just made, or an account of a hailstorm he had driven out specially to see.