It’s been a strange year, personally. Not a bad year, just a strange one. I’ve been skittering along on the surface of things, to busy too focus on any one specific project, reading too many books too quickly to let them sink in. Which is astonishing — after I finished my dissertation a whole lifetime ago I felt like I would never read for pleasure again; I felt like academia had thoroughly crushed my ability to read for pleasure.
Well, it didn’t. It just took a long time to come back. And I know that one day (soon) I’ll be writing again. But it’s been a strange year, one filled with babysitting my grandchild pretty much full-time while my son and daughter-in-law get their businesses off the ground, and other responsibilities tucked in around the edges. I have been too busy for art.
So this morning, while I was trying to figure out which of the half-dozen novels I’ve recently finished I would write about, I tripped over the viral clip from last night’s Grammy’s of Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs performing “Fast Car,” and suddenly it’s 6:30 a.m. and I’m sitting in the pre-dawn crying helplessly, hopelessly happy to be alive to hear a perfect melding of past and present, of two beautiful voices lyrically blending with a bare-bones guitar line and expressing both absolute beauty and utter desperation.
We spend so much of our time judging and calculating, and so little just living and appreciating the moment.
We all take different routes in life, but the trajectory is the same. Always. Get through today, worry about tomorrow tomorrow — today is too busy, too filled, to notice that the sunrise in February first hits the world at just this one single spot and this one specific angle, and if you hold still and breathe, you’ll watch the everything from horizon to horizon flood with light. If you can just hold still. You’ll see it.
There was a person in my life, Mark Hawthorne, who mastered the art of holding still. He taught it (and much else) to me. He was a longtime friend who died in October 2023. I’ve been helping his partner settle their affairs and get their house ready to sell and the partner ready to move and start fresh after 40 years. Before that, through his illness and for the last year of his life, I spent a lot of time with him, enjoying his company and repaying a small balance of the debt I owed him. Because, you see, Mark changed my life. I’d like to tell you a little about him tonight, with my thanks to Tracy Chapman for writing a gorgeous song and a performance last night that wrapped up the past two years for me.
I met Mark when I was 17, at Freshman Orientation at James Madison University. Well, back then it was Madison College, a small southern school in a rather sleepy town, and Mark was the head of the English Department. I enrolled as an English major, and all majors were required to meet their department heads. I was one of half a dozen students crammed into an office when this larger-than-life fellow walked in and asked each of us “Why do you want to major in English?” The rest said they wanted to teach.
I did not want to teach, so I answered “I want to be a writer.” (Well, I couldn’t just say that I liked to read and had no confidence that I’d be good at anything else, could I?) Mark looked at me, really looked at me. For someone who was both comfortable and accustomed to being ignored, it was a profoundly disconcerting experience. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I left that meeting utterly terrified. I spent a long time living in healthy fear of him.
But it was fated that we would get along well. For one thing, JMU’s English Department was typical of a small southern school — overstuffed with Americanists and specializing in Southern Literature, a genre that most definitely did not interest me. Mark had been brought on with a handful of new professors who taught European literature (multicultural literature was still a distant and vague promise for the future). Mark’s primary specialty was English and Irish Victorian Lit, neither of which did much for me — but despite my terror I managed to wrangle special permission from him to take a graduate level seminar in Old English the second semester of my freshman year, and from there it was all-medieval for me. But Mark’s interests were what caught me, and his interests were wide; there was no genre off limits for him, no subject he couldn’t get excited about (except Southern lit, so we bonded over that).
Nothing was off-limits. He loved Tolkien at a time when everyone else sniffed at the idea of Tolkien as “fantasy trash.” He made is officially okay to read science fiction and fantasy, and read it widely and deeply himself. He taught me the history of censorship and the ways artists circumvented and tricked censors. He taught the intricacies of James Joyce, and his delights. We shared music and he introduced me to opera; I introduced him to U2. He taught me prosody and critiqued my poetry. He taught Victorian novels and world mythology. He taught a brilliant course in “Paganism and the Occult” that got the Philosophy and Religion Department in an uproar because, although they would never have taught the subject they thought they were being encroached upon. Then, when they realized he was teaching from an anthropological perspective, they got the Psychology and Anthropology Department stirred up. At the time, I knew nothing about that — all I knew was that I and the other lucky 20-odd students who were in the course would have crawled through fire rather than miss a lecture. It’s still one of the best courses I’ve ever taken, and I’ll never look at a double-bladed axe and not see a butterfly, symbol of regeneration.
In the meantime, as the department experienced growing pains and the toxicity of politics, Mark was widowed. His wife died of cancer, and his grief was profound and deep. I was a day student, living at home (it was the only way I could afford to go to school), and my family pulled Mark close. It was remarkable, really, that this cultured academic with a devoted following of undergraduates (I was one of many) would have bonded with a family that put the fun in dysfunction. But it happened.
There were many guardrails as our friendships developed — because JMU was a small southern school and the knives were out for the outsiders (Mark was definitely an outsider — in many ways). For one, he was gay. He’d had a great marriage and been a devoted husband to Lydia but, after she was gone and he started to swim out of the depth of grief, he met Wayne. They had 40 years together. But back then, gay people had to be closeted if they wanted to keep their careers. On the other side of the scale, a male professor fraternizing with female undergrads was another professional death pit. So he had a tightrope to walk, in many ways, as did I. We settled on a strategy: friendship far away from the campus, professional distance on campus.
That wasn’t easy for Mark to hide any aspect of his personality. He was gregarious, a big imposing Irishman with a lot more bark than bite. I modeled his approach in the classroom and, like him, was amused to find out my students were terrified of me. I never had discipline problems, and I had Mark to thank for that. He taught me how to like my students the way he liked his, and how to treat them with equal measures of authority and respect. When he taught, his approach was always, “Here’s a cool thing — what do you think?”
When he tired of one subject — when he felt there wasn’t much more that he could learn from it — he’d move on to something else. He had majored in Greek and disliked Latin. It was too militaristic. He read French fluently but said his pronunciation was terrible. I never heard him speak it. He loved to listen to me read in Middle English — Old English was too Germanic, too many clashy consonants for him. As the years passed, after I graduated, he taught Vonnegut and Pynchon, and then left the Literature Department and moved into Technical Writing, where he taught web programming and design back in the days of hand coding. He taught into his 80’s.
All those years we remained close. We’d give each other books and when we got together we had to be careful not to bore everyone else with our conversations. I critiqued his writing — he wrote a bunch of novels that were good but he didn’t think they were good enough and in time, burned the manuscripts. I’m still mad at him for that. When he would get annoyed with me I’d call him a stubborn old Irishman, and it always cracked him up. He wrote one of the first academic treatments of queer theory published. It’s a good book. He encouraged me to write and critiqued my novels, and we both agreed I needed to improve my plotting. I’ve been working on that. If I ever publish, I’ll dedicate my first book to him. I honestly don’t know how my life would have turned out without him.
When he died, he left me just two things: his woodworking shop and his library. (Yes, outside of reading and writing, he was a woodworker. He took it up seriously after he retired. In his 80’s. Over his lifetime he was a painter, built furniture, model ships and miniature houses, and had a host of other interests over the years). The woodworking shop is in pieces in my barn, where I’m going to assemble it as soon as the space is cleared out.
The library — well, the library numbered in the thousands, volumes collected over a lifetime. I selected a couple of books I want to keep — some mythology, a few references, Jung’s Red Book, his teaching copies of Joyce and Pynchon and his Absolute Sandman. But I’m going to pass the rest on to other people.
So, circling back to this morning, I feel like I’ve been on a treadmill, running hard and going nowhere, for a long time. Helping with the house has been a chore. But more than that, grief brings on paralysis; we don’t want to recognize that the world is a different place today. We fill our lives with busy-ness and avoid that enormous feeling that everything has changed; gravity has shifted slightly. That awareness comes on slowly, like the first shafts of sunlight on a clear February morning, tentative at first but unmistakable, unignorable, inevitable.
Thank you, Mark. You grew old but you never were old; you were like a bonsai that puts out tender leaves on gnarled branches. Things were always new to you, and you never feared growing and changing. You taught me how to love art, and you mastered the art of living, and passed those lessons on.
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