Delayed Mail

Hi John,

I am writing to you across four decades of life and death. I am aware that you passed away a couple of decades ago from lung cancer. You may have well been a chain smoker when we knew each other. I don't know. We all smoked back then. I smoked a pipe back then so you boggarting joints might not have made a big impression on me.

In 1970 you were Associate Professor of Government and International Relations at Claremont Graduate School. You became my advisor on my dissertation, which had already been stillborn for six years. It is so painful for me to remember this now. Then I could not face this. I could not face myself.

You were a breath of fresh air. Open, authentic, honest, fearless. You were comfortable in your own skin. Comfortable with change. You had sparking blue eyes, earrings, Kaftan, boots and ambience of genial testosterone. It was rumored that you were bi-sexual! Did that threaten me, too? I was afraid to have a cup of coffee with you.

Your initial impulse was to restructure my dissertation project into something of more limited scope. You were invested in me helping myself. How could you help, you wanted to know. You set up due-dates for me to get things done. When I didn't have them done, You called. I was afraid to answer the phone. But I tried to keep my distance, fight you off. I did not want my dissertation saved. I did not want to be saved. I did not want to face myself.

You wanted to get to know me, even tried to get me to invite you to go sailing. And that was not a dishonest or insincere suggestion, I realize now, in view of the fact that you eventually became a surfer-dude in New Zealand.

In 1970, many of us students needed direction. The country had gone to hell. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy had been killed. The Republicans stole the presidency, escalated the Vietnam war into Cambodia. Kent State was about to explode. You were younger than the other professors. You 'got' us. You were looking for directions your students could re-direct their thought in order to avoid the absolute corruption into which America had fallen. You mirrored my extent mistrust of an academic intellectualism which denied the humanizing influence of emotional experience and reflection.

If I had opted to let you into my life, who knows what might have happened? Would I have turned my dissertation over to you? Should I have surrendered my dubious work to you? That's how some grad students got through: serving as a willing mouth-piece spokesman for their advisor. Would I have become one of your satellites?

I don't know. But I would not have settled, as I did, for decades of working as a fake high school teacher.

You bent over backwards to help me out of my shell. I never said good-bye, or thanked you for your efforts. I do so now.

~~Wann