August 15,1941—December 11, 2025
My association with Jim goes back to 1979 when I moved into the Deluxe. Apartment O, as in the letter O, but Jim called it apartment 0, as in zero, a humorously derogatory reference denoting loser status to anyone who rented the basement apartment. What he and I had in common was renting that apartment while in relationships with women who lived in the upper floors of that apartment house on Eighteenth Avenue in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was hard not to immediately take to Jim Limardi, this affable man with completely unpretentious charm, a rugged handsome face that seemed to have his character imprinted in his features, a nose that would have looked out of place anywhere but Jim’s face, acne scars that almost seemed like marks of wisdom, contributed to defining a man who put his weaknesses on full view of those he loved in order to reach understanding. That was Jim’s holy grail, understanding. Did he ever achieve it? It hardly mattered. For Jim, it was the search, the inquisition of the soul, that defined him for me. He was a dilettante in the original positive meaning of the word, someone who explored with vigor numerous arts and human endeavors. He had great talent about him, but seemed to use it for his own meditation, rather than the attempt to master anything. His drawings and paintings, his music, from lute to ukulele, his insatiable consumption of literature, history and poetry were fully visible to those who knew him, but rarely displayed in any public manner. It was hugely flattering for someone like Jim to tell me he admired my poetry. Because he knew what he was talking about in the case of poetry, often more than I did. His profession was as a teacher, which seemed only natural and preordained.
It is impossible to think of who Jim was without thinking of his long-lived friendship with Jeff Winslow, someone we both greatly admired and loved. Jeff could be a hard guy to love sometimes, especially in his early years when alcohol on occasion contributed to a meanness that none of us appreciated. Jim was among the few who took the brunt of those cruelties and when we shared a house rental across the street from Jeff in a little neighborhood we called Garlic Gulch, I observed how tormented he could be when experiencing Jeff’s dismissal. (In those days, I wasn’t close enough to be a victim. Later Jeff rid himself of this habit, mellowing into his kindly half, expressing his love unreservedly.) During this time (after I had left my marriage) Jim and I spent many nights staying up late, drinking wine and talking about art and politics and the complexities of living. Sometimes we went out together for a drink. He was a fashionista in his own way. He would spend 45 minutes before going out, primping to look perfectly casually dressed. The perfect for him was the imperfect, which he made an art. He wouldn’t leave the house until he was satisfied he looked perfectly imperfect. We were unlikely housemates and he liked to refer to us as the odd couple. It was during this time when he met Martha. I was with him when he struck up a conversation with her at a bar. It was apparent when we lived together, that he was eager to find a woman to share his life with, and Martha filled the bill, perfectly it would turn out. I left Seattle in 1989, returning often, always making a visit with Jim part of any trip back west. Our usual activity was a long walk and a long conversation, never boring.
When Jeff died, Jim and I spoke on the phone and he confided in me how lost he felt without the friend with whom he spoke regularly on the phone. I’m not big on phone calls, but after Jeff died, I filled that space, to degree. We talked two or three times a month. We shared what we were reading, listening to, watching, laughing at our diminished memories for names and titles. We argued sometimes, bringing back for me the days when we lived together and had debates over subjects big and small. When I got a text from Martha from Jim’s phone that he was gone, I was stunned and my hands involuntarily covered my face in sudden grief. I thought Jim would be with us for much longer. I often think of the losses we endure at this age as a disappearing map of the times that defined our generation. For me, Jim was a significant landmark on that road map.
I don’t have a poem about Jim, but a poem that comes from a quintessential memory of those Garlic Gulch days in the early eighties, concerns an epic wilderness hike Jim, Jeff, Hal Glatsburg and I took in the Cascades over five days and four nights. It’s called Little Giant. I had hesitated to go, not being much of mountaineer, so Jim enticed me, knowing my politics, by jokingly saying “Come on, we’ll be discussing Lenin’s ‘What Is To Be Done’”. How could I say no? It was so Jim Limardi. The excursion inspired a song I wrote that was on my first album, a song that was sung and recorded by other artists, about guerrillas in the mountains of El Salvador. It was Jim who put the thought in my head with his pensive imagination, and the poem references that moment.
Martha says she thinks of Jim after death, being in Spain at the end of a day of walking the Camino de Santiago, drinking a glass of red wine and engaging in a discussion about life. If Jim were to invent a heaven, I think it’s a good bet that that’s exactly what it would be.
Little Giant
The mountaineers have come to pick me up
for our trek over Little Giant. There are three of them,
each with his flask of whiskey in his 40-pound pack.
Jim’s old green truck barely makes it over the pass
and the snowfields on the mountain peaks
seem closer than they are. The wars are raging
in Central America and yes, this is long ago
when we talked of dropping everything to enter
the jungles and join the guerillas to give the coffee
plantations to the peasants. Instead we climb
higher into the tundra where the mountain breaks away
under our feet. Jeff leads the way since he chose
the route and after a day of scrambling vertically
we pitch a couple of 2-man tents just below the summit.
It is here I begin having visions of la guardia
advancing with AK-47s slung over their shoulders,
because Limardi, with his incessant questions and
ponderings, has put the suggestion in my mind’s eye.
Hal is beginning to resemble Che in his soiled Khakis
and torn t-shirt and the sound of Blue Angels
can be heard over the western peaks where civilization
has settled into the valleys to commemorate
the 4th of July, though no one has a proper explanation
for why they are celebrating. The cheap scotch
I bought at the package store fell out of my pack
and into the creek at the last crossing, so our rations
will be restricted for the next few nights,
which will be dark, for the moon is new and as invisible
as the god who made her. Lenin would have asked,
What is to be done? And answered his own question
with clarity, though we all know nothing worked out
the way he would have liked. We produce our tiny
burners and our propane bottles as the night cools
and blackens. Coffee bitter, needing to be cut
with Jim’s bourbon. Look below, the campfires
of the Falangist patrol. Keep them in sight, always
a day ahead, our only hope, our families safe below.
We should know by now we don’t advance into the future.
We trudge, with the heavy chain of memory
weighing us down, as we cross the glacial field.
John Paul O'Connor 