“Hold On To Your Hats, Gang”

That was what you would say, just before you were ready to give us some incredible insight into the words. You commanded our attention, almost dancing in front of the room while I tried to find some way to meld into the wooden seat and become part of the furniture. My presence would only diminish the magic, but I couldn’t bear to miss it. Couldn’t bear to miss you. Two or three times a week, sometimes more– during the times when I was brave –I would come to witness and watch. You were more than brilliant. You were energy radiating through the poetry on the pages; you were light illuminating dusty volumes and darkened corners where ideas lurked.

Occasionally, you ate an onion, like an apple, all the while talking and breathing wisdom into the space. Other times, it would be a tomato…salt shaker in one hand, tomato in the other, garbage can center stage to catch whatever fell to the sides. You would think that one or the other would be worth noting, as you paused to take a bite or two, but you never did. Neither a tomato or an onion could stem the train of thought that emanated from you on those alternating days of the week. It was all a part of you, like the hat and overcoat you wore coming and going from our classes. I am sure there were early fall and late spring days when the Washington weather would climb into the heat of summer, but I don’t recall ever seeing you outside without those two accessories.

In one of those seasons of bravery, I approached you and asked if you would be my advisor. A huge mistake, practically speaking (because you could not be bothered with the details of what classes needed to be taken and in what order to ensure that I would graduate on time…which I did not), but a gift that I credit for being the person I am today. I remember you handed me a poem, on a small, torn piece of paper. “A Man Said To The Universe” by Stephen Crane. You handed this to me while imparting some glorious words of wisdom, squatting on your chair, eating a tomato. I kept that paper for as long as I could before it got lost in my many moves through early adulthood. But I have rewritten it in my own handwriting in many, many journals and dog eared it in several different volumes of poetry. I am still trying to understand my place in this universe.

I read about your life today, written in the obituary from the small town on Martha’s Vineyard. I was jealous of your children and your grandchildren, of your friends and colleagues. I wished that I had been courageous enough to speak, to ask questions, to tell you how incredible your passion for poetry was, how that passion embedded deep in my being and grew, steadily, for the thirty plus years after I graduated. You lived much longer than I could have imagined, because in 1988, when I first heard about how you hung out with Robert Frost and the others who were invited to his cabin in the woods, you seemed to be ancient. You weren’t, I now realize, but I guess that doesn’t really matter. (And you didn’t just die; you died last year, at the age of 97.) While part of me felt a pang of “well, I really should have told him how much of an impact he had on me” the rational side reminded me that I never could have found the right words. No words could have ever been worthy.

Rodin’s The Thinker

And then I remembered how you would, quite often, assume the position of Rodin’s sculpture and pause for a moment…before making a bathroom joke.

There may have been thousands of students who sat in your classes, majoring not in American Poetry, but in Ganz, but there was only one professor that still impacts me today. One day I’ll find the words to say thank you.