9 September 2024

The sound that broke through my dream this morning seemed a cross between the coyotes’ eerie roll call I often hear at night and the honking of geese headed south.  The dream—of a group effort to set up Christmas trees for an outside display; was one of us Alec Baldwin??—dissipated, slowly replaced by curiosity sufficient to rouse me from my happy slumber back in my own bed after two nights away in Kentucky.  Geese passing in their V-formation, a wavering skein, could not have made a noise lasting that long, and I’ve never known the coyotes to howl in the morning light.  Like Frankenstein’s monster, I hobbled unsteadily to draw the bedroom curtains, my arthritic joints further stiffened by the restrictions 737s impose on Southwest passengers.  Mystery solved:  a rafter of 14 turkeys roiling in a spiraling circle at the bottom of the hill below my bedroom window, not clucking, not gobbling, but, I learn via Google, calling their assembly yelp, a cluck/purr that adult hens use to gather poults that have wandered off:  yuuup, yuuuuup, yuuuuuuup, yuuuuuuuup.  Or was it their early morning tree yelp, simply the turkeys’ way of talking among themselves?

Whatever my ineptitude decoding turkey talk, the sound and then sight—like a witchy coven casting a corporate spell—was sufficient to dispel my habitual morning dread of all that needs doing that I don’t want to do, getting me out of bed and back into the world with some considered gratitude for my privileged circumstances and yet another safe return home, this time from Danville KY to Louisville to Orlando to Manchester to Madbury NH.

How absurd that to get back to Manchester from Louisville I had first to fly to Orlando, and after a three-plus-hour layover sit on the runway another 45 minutes delayed by a passing thunderstorm.  One blessing:  flight 2040 had 100 open seats.  In typically wry Southwest fashion, the flight attendant announced that seeing any passengers sitting three abreast with so many open seats available, “we WILL make fun of you.”

Time spent in the pleasant liminal space of the Orlando airport offered a pretty fair dinner of shrimp and grits at the Cask and Larder with a local draught IPA called Five Points described as composed of “centennial, columbus, mosaic, citra, simcoe, and warrior hops.”  Is’t possible?  Buoyed by the beer’s ABV of 7.2, I was inspired to roam the concourse, recording signs of its fantasy portal significance, even as a glimpse of Kamala Harris on a bar tv screen offered a remote reminder of high stakes reality, with THE debate just two days away.

And it was probably the IPA that prompted me to follow up a compliment from Centre College friend Bill about my just-published book by reading the sample chapters now available on Amazon.com on my phone.   Riddled with anxiety about the reception of Will to Live:  Learning from Shakespeare How to Be and NOT to Be, I consoled myself by thinking, once again, that the writing wasn’t half bad.  Of course, maybe that was the IPA talking.  Dear Future Readers out there:  you will, I hope, decide.

On the flight from Louisville, I had been seated next to a couple flying to Orlando for a hardware convention.  Politely leaving me to my New Yorker, they waiting till we landed to chat and reveal that while they were in town on business, they had a daughter who was currently working in Paris’s Disney World.  Having announced at age 8 that she wanted to work for Disney, the daughter has done just that, climbing the corporate ladder from custodial assignments to overseeing ride safety.  Her dad proudly proclaimed her salary more than what both her parents put together made; her mom as proudly declared her “married to the mouse.”  And though she was currently in Paris, she’d nevertheless arranged VIP passes for her parents to all Disney offers in Orlando.  Quite right, too.

Of course, spending time in Orlando might also be some cosmic joke the universe—or my recently departed friend and mentor Roberta White—was playing on me.  Afterall, Orlando as a character links my academic turf with Bobbie’s, mine Shakespeare and hers Virginia Woolf.  The only reason I was in Orlando was Southwest’s quirky routing from Louisville to Manchester, and the only reason I was in Louisville was its proximity to Danville, Kentucky, where on Saturday Bobbie’s family, friends, and colleagues gathered in Old Carnegie on the Centre College campus to remember and celebrate our much loved Roberta White.  All who offered formal remembrances were moving and eloquent—not surprising, given such native talent nurtured and enhanced over decades by Bobbie’s brilliant teaching, canny mentoring, clever collegiality, and loving friendship.  I was most moved by Mark Lucas, once Bobbie’s student, then longtime colleague, and now the just-retired emeritus (forever young and handsome, the crush of generations!) Jobson Professor of English at Centre.  Unable to find the reading glasses that he later discovered right in his breast pocket, he had to accept a pair offered, amusingly still on their tether, from an obliging audience member in order to read an account of his search for the treasure he found among Bruce and Bobbie’s extensive library:  Bobbie’s annotated copy of Ulysses.

I’m so grateful that I had had an hour’s conversation with Bobbie in May, one we knew would be our last, yet one just as witty, informed, honest, and loving as all the many others we’ve had since I joined the Centre faculty in 1984.  I of course was also mightily aware throughout the weekend of my own golden age past in the company of such warm and erudite colleagues, many still close friends even after the almost 30 years since I left cozy, nurturing Centre and my tenured position for the much thornier comparative anonymity of the always marginal tribe of adjuncts and affiliates at the smallish, grossly under-funded state university that is UNH.  Much has changed in the macrocosm of academia, too, since I left Centre in 1995, and certainly the Centre I left is not the Centre it now is, with its then vaunted humanities program now discarded.  But how gratifying to feel all those connections still vital—even ones I didn’t know existed.

My good fortune was to have two mentors at Centre, Bobbie White and Carol Bastian.  One week from today it will be ten years since Carol died on 16 September 2014, and her three children, Julie, Tim, and Tony were there in Danville to remember Bobbie along with the rest of us.  Julie was the only one I had met before, and though I kept thinking I should know her—she very much resembles her mom—I didn’t place her until she came to me.  Julie introduced me to her brothers; I had, of course, heard many tales of all three young Bastians over my long friendship with Carol.  What I hadn’t counted on, however, was that they would know much about me.  On first meeting Tony, he said, “Oh!  You’re the one who gave up her job for love!”

It’s true, I think, that we often underestimate how much others take in about us.  There’s a Hidden Brain episode about this (“The Influence You Have:  Why We Fail to See Our Power Over Others,” 24 February 2021).  But the influence is there, however unacknowledged.  And what a consolation for loss that it is!  My mother Virginia used to say we never lose the ones we love so long as we remember them.  How many gratefully remember the likes of Roberta White and Carol Bastian!  My Shakespeare professor at Tulane, Ned Partridge (remarkably also former professor to his then student, Milton Reigelman, the professor who hired me at Centre), once said:   the professor’s job is to make himself obsolete.  I get what he meant, but presumptuous pronoun use aside, I don’t think that’s quite right.  “Obsolete” implies discarding.  And we don’t discard what shapes us:  we incorporate what shapes us, in a literal sense, as a tree will sometimes envelop the supporting fence it grows beside.  Our nurture becomes part of our nature.

So rest in peace, Roberta.  Your work here is finished, but the work goes on thanks to you.  Blessed be the tie that binds.