Sad Stories

I haven't blogged much lately, as everyone who still checks in here knows. The once-a-week gig (more or less) at Inside Higher Ed seems to satisfy whatever need I have to broadcast my opinions to the world. I do miss the recipes I used to post here--but at least the ones I put here are still archived. And I miss writing as much as I used to, but there are other things taking up that time.

If I were still blogging more I have no doubt that I would have had some things to say about the BP spill. And I probably would have had something to say about the heartbreaking loss Katie Allison Granju (mamapundit) has just suffered. In fact I did manage to say a little about both in this week's post for Inside Higher Ed. There's more to say about both--but I'm not sure I'm the person to say it.

In Memoriam

I learned today that one of my high school teachers, Otis Benson Davis, died earlier this week. O.B., as we all called him (only behind his back--to his face he was, of course, Mr. Davis), graduated from Kent School in 1942 and returned to teach there full time in 1949. He retired from active teaching only a few years ago, in 2006.

I graduated from Kent 36 years after O.B. did. He was my AP English teacher, my senior year; he was also the English department chair, and his influence was pervasive in the department. He was the co-author of the textbook we used for AP English, The Idea of Man (now out of print), and he was the teacher who introduced me to Hamlet, King Lear, and Oedipus as well as Out of the Silent Planet and Point of No Return. O.B. didn't think that, as 17 and 18-year-olds, we were too young to "get" dramas of middle and old age such as Point of No Return and King Lear; he didn't think we needed to be pandered to or coddled. I might choose different books than he did to teach seniors in high school--I imagine he chose different books, too, over the years--but I still remember what we read and, especially, his presence in the classroom, pushing, probing, questioning so that we read better, read deeper.

Part of AP English then--and, I imagine, now--involved drafting the college essay. My first draft, as I recall it, was unimpressive. O.B. wrote in the margin that it was a "cursory adumbration" of a much better essay. I had to look up "adumbration." I didn't ask him to define it; I knew it was my job to figure out what he meant and then to act on it. We sat around a seminar table in his class and discussed our essays, and the books we were reading, and started to feel like scholars.

We weren't, of course, but his confidence in us was, at least for me, infectious. When I started teaching I thought of O.B. all the time. I couldn't emulate him as a teacher--I didn't have his gravitas, his beard, his pipe. But I could and did remember the care he took with my essays, the love he had for literature. His was the approval I sought, the criticism I learned from, the example that inspired me. I can't say for sure that I'm an English professor because O.B. was my teacher, but I know he was a part of what made me choose the path I did. I did have the chance to say "thank you," years later, and I'm glad I did, but I'll say it again.

Thank you, O.B. Rest in peace.

In peace

As many of you already know, Literary Mama columnist Vicki Forman's son Evan died suddenly earlier this week. I've never met Vicki and her family, but I've been privileged to know them through her words, which have touched me repeatedly in the years she's been writing her remarkable columns. I've just read through her archive, and my heart nearly stopped when I read this:

After my twins were born, I understood how life could change in an instant, and never be the same.

I also understood the terror of the counterpoint, “Life goes on.” A friend made this remark shortly after Evan’s birth and Ellie’s death. She’d patiently listened to me talk about the suddenness with which my life had changed, of my inability to think of the future or of a time when I wasn’t bowed under by grief. “Life changes,” she said, “but life also goes on.”

What I could not tell my friend, but what I knew to be true was this: when life changes in an instant, it does go on for others, but not for you. Grief holds you tight, and only loosens its bounds slowly, in unpredictable bursts.

As grief holds you tight again, Vicki, I pray you feel its bounds loosening in time as well. I grieve your loss, and I thank you for sharing Evan's life with me, with all of us.

Evan David Kamida
July 30, 2000 - July 24, 2008

There's a brief tribute to Evan at Vicki's column site, and information about contributing to a memorial fund.

Loss

It's been a busy week, as the weeks after Mother's Day always are, it seems. Once graduation rolls around there are all kinds of things in the kids' lives--tests, parties, special assignments due--and in ours as well, as our friends all come out from under their busy semesters and want to get together, as do we. I also "went back to work," in a manner of speaking, this week, with two days of workshops to jumpstart a fall project. So there's been a lot going on, most of it fun.

But it was punctuated by sadness. Our beloved and beautiful cat, Anna, had been ailing for a while, and this week we finally let her go. We knew as of Monday that the end was near, and we said good-bye to her yesterday. This is the first pet I've lost in this way; only one of our childhood pets died when I was a child, and I was almost completely unaware of her passing. I'd left home by the time my own childhood cat, Misty, died. This is also the first time our kids have lost a pet, and it hit Mariah hard. She chose Anna from the Siamese rescue society eight years ago--or Anna chose her--and they had been companions ever since.

Today I see her food bowls and the hair that she shed on the couch and I expect to see her come around the corner, but she won't. She had a good life with us, but--as my mother said earlier today--there will always be a hole in our hearts for her.

In Memoriam

The world lost two brave souls yesterday, men I knew only a little but who had a great impact on those I love--one my uncle by marriage, the other the father of a dear friend. Both were surrounded by family as they died; both were men of great faith. Their loss has left me a bit poorer, struggling for words of comfort or hope. As usual, I find that others have said it better. In Tennyson's great poem of mourning I find a reason to look for words, and in Hopkins's celebration of life I find a bit, I think, of the faith that sustained both.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam A.H.H. Obit. MDCCCXXXIII
V
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
"As kingfishers catch fire"


AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Go in peace.

what to say?

It's been a surreal few days. Sunday a neighbor reported on a mugging in the neighborhood--no one was hurt, but the mugger waved a gun and that's always scary. Monday I came in to the office and one of the women who works in my building told me a dreadful story of a pickup truck driver run amuk. Twice the guy nearly killed her, speeding and running red lights. Looks like he might have killed someone else instead. Then of course the news came from VA Tech. Because I live in a cave, I didn't hear until mid-afternoon, when a friend walked in to my office and said, "So, we're not ever sending our kids to college, right?" But here we are on a college campus, a campus not that far from Blacksburg, a campus --like Tech's-- noted for its safety, its security.

We are not safe. We mostly don't think about how not safe we are, because if we did we'd be paralyzed. So we do what we need to in order to protect ourselves --get out of the way of the speeding truck, choose the lighted streets and a couple of companions when we're walking home, park under a streetlight, lock the doors-- and then we try to forget why we're doing it. Every now and then we are reminded.

In Blacksburg everyone's been reminded, just as in Baghdad, Darfur, and Chad, everyone's been reminded. Just as we were reminded in 2001, and again on New Year's day 2006. It's not a safe world. But if we act on fear, if we allow it to take over, we allow ourselves to be diminished. The stories that I have most wanted to read from Iraq and Darfur have been about ordinary people living their lives --NPR did a lovely one by an Iraqi translator whose wife was pregnant, for example (sorry, can't find a link). They live their lives.

Jo(e)'s candles help. The student reporters at VA Tech help. Teaching, and talking, and writing, help.

In Memoriam, Molly Ivins

The tributes are all over the internet. Becca has one, and Dawn, and of course Dr. B. has one with lots of good links. The pictures are great, aren't they? And the stories. I hope the stories keep coming.

[Edited to add:] They do keep coming: here are a few more, from Susan (great picture!) and Caroline and Elizabeth.