Tag: memorial

Bill, Another Time

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

“It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen” (13).

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore

Although I can’t believe it and the words don’t come readily, I thought I should try to peck a few lines on the sudden, tragic loss this week of Bill Hart-Davidson, a great and giving friend and colleague and mentor to countless people, and to me. He died on Monday, unexpectedly, due to a cardiac event while out for a springtime run.

Throughout the week I’ve read and deeply appreciated the memories others have recounted on social media (mostly FB), accounts repeating in the sense that nearly every one of them underscores Bill’s kindness and generosity. These qualities with Bill seemed predispositional, baked in, more settled than even a first principle, call it an ur principle, or a fiber of being. He was kind, generous. To me this meant that he always treated me better than I expected, or deserved, to be treated; he listened for and understood better than I could, the filaments of my ideas. This in turn sourced his encouragement; it felt almost like he could, by listening as he did, describe your meandering, nascent ideas back to you more lucidly than they had existed before. Almost a superpower in academia, we could call this regenerative listening, to take another’s criss-crossed wayfinding and to plant a few low-key pathway lights.

After I learned on Tuesday about the unfathomable lightning strike of Bill’s untimely death, I heard myself describing him to a few people who I see most days and who could tell I was carrying on, academia-in-April-style, with a sharp and heavy pain: he lifted others by the hundreds, juggled fire and more, threw disc golf with the love of his life in their magical backyard, ran and biked and yet never appeared tired, played bass, never missed an EWM tournament pick ’em, and associate-deaned so wholeheartedly and with rare optimism that we were all better for it.

I don’t remember meeting Bill before 2009, but he was then and there in that moment, my first semester at EMU, what was a short drive down I-96 from MSU, a fast friend, thoughtful and engaging and abundantly convivial. In truth, he was more the longtime friend of Steve K. and Steve B., two of my new-at-the-time EMU colleagues. They would golf, for example, and oftentimes invite me, but I wouldn’t go, golf not really appealing to me. But this hospitality extended to so many other occasions: a lunch meeting at MSU that spring (of 2010) to talk with Malea Powell about whether NCTE could be persuaded to preserve the infrastructure (or at least the data) from CCC Online Archive, or New Year’s Eves at The Compound throughout the 2010s when I could tag along and enjoy seeing again so many of the MSU WRAC crew. There was a time when, at EMU, I was hailed from across the parking lot as Steve (which Steve, nobody could say), and this was a low key running joke Bill and I shared, how to be friends with the Steves while not surrendering overmuch to Stevenesses.

In April 2011, I flew on Spirit Airlines to the Atlanta CCCC. I stayed only a couple of nights, crowding into a roomshare with Bill and Steve K., claiming the rollout couch, and making the most of the conference on a spare budget. The trip back to Michigan was by car, twelve hours along I-75, with a stop-off in Lexington, Ky., to visit with Jim. On that drive, we came up with plans for what would be the first of several WIDE-EMU conferences, a local, free, one-day conference on a football-free Saturday in late September or early October, hosting first at EMU, then alternating, MSU, EMU, MSU, EMU. Bill taught me the value of these affordable, accessible structures of participation, about how articulating them made them so, about how they sewed connections, rapport, goodwill, and senses of belonging to something bigger than only local programs and institutions in isolation could offer. Proof of concept was among Bill’s maxims, and WIDE-EMU proved again and again the richness of low cost sociality for the field.

When I took to the mid-career job market in 2017-2018, Bill had just blurbed Network Sense, a continuation of the ways he’d steadfastly encouraged that work over the years, and I asked if he would be willing to write a letter on my behalf, which he did. Later, when I was sitting with a difficult decision–one of the most difficult decisions of my life in that it would require me to move 500 miles away from Is., who was then in middle school, he was there, available to talk on the phone, to weigh pros and cons, and to think across those sometimes hard to follow dotted lines from minutiae to the biggest of big pictures and back again. He was more generous with me than I deserved or could ever repay. And I always felt like had I asked for more–of his time, of his perspective, of his guidance–he’d have given it. Is there any purer form of friendly mentorship, or uplift than this?

Recently Is., who is now a high school senior, committed to MSU and so will be in East Lansing this fall, dormitory living, a first-year student, middle of the mitten verdant as only a new Spartan can be. All those years ago, I grew up an hour north of Lansing, and with a wish for return, also because I don’t mind at all the long cold gray winters, I’d given my best attempts over the years to find and follow a path along the Red Cedar River, first as a PhD applicant, then as a professorial one, kindly and gently declined in each case. In addition to witnessing Is.’s beaming green about the years ahead, among the things I most looked forward to about her being at MSU was reconnecting with Bill, catching up with him for a beer or over lunch, talking, listening, being excited about ideas, feeling smarter than before; I’d been so looking forward to this as the best-of East Lansing, taking some reassurance in knowing that Bill’s friendly, timeless wisdom was nearby.

I know I am not alone with the magnitudes of upheaval felt across the past several days. And through that jarring sadness, especially for those who loved him most, for his closest colleagues, friends, and former students, especially for the Steves, especially for L. and L., all of whom deserved more time1I remember a time, probably at the #beerrhetorics gathering following one of the WIDE-EMUs, when someone asked Bill whether he was working on a book, and his wry response was that he was, that it was for the time being called Otra Vez, a phrase that was especially flexible for sometimes meaning ‘another time,’ sometimes meaning ‘again,’ sometimes meaning ‘anew.’, in Bill’s memory and honor, I wish for clearings mapped in soft hewn outlines to allow for the fitfulness of grief, and for remembering well and again every, every of the best parts.

Notes

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    I remember a time, probably at the #beerrhetorics gathering following one of the WIDE-EMUs, when someone asked Bill whether he was working on a book, and his wry response was that he was, that it was for the time being called Otra Vez, a phrase that was especially flexible for sometimes meaning ‘another time,’ sometimes meaning ‘again,’ sometimes meaning ‘anew.’

Once Folded

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 6 mins

Every June 11, calendar taps my shoulder, Do you know what today is?

Of course, I do. It’s the day my mom died. On a Wednesday. In 1997. At the age of forty-eight. *looks back at the calendar, unfazed and unflinching* What’s it to you?

I’ve written about it before, not remembering as much as returning to something temporally recognizable, a time of life and time of year faint and hollow but still capable of stinging, in the orbit of one strange loop. In 2005, making sense of Barthes’ the almost; in 2007, mysterious disappearances, a bona fide insurance coverage, resonant for conceptual elasticity, bearing on the job I worked in 1997 when my dad called out of the blue, bearing on the how death and why death questions that never gathered much in the way of answers. And then, “Have Some Soup,” an entry I still read from time to time when I’m missing her because I came close to getting it right, language being clumsy and unwieldy, minds too for the curlicued circuits of remembering and forgetting, processing loss and processing continuations, pin-pointing a few of the (oftentimes kitchen-based) clicks of “I’m here now,” “I” referring, of course, to “we.” Here we are now.

I went to her gravesite in Missouri last September. And after, posted this on FB:

Stone and grass and engravings.

Of course a Kansas City excursion includes a visit to my mom’s gravesite, what’s a burial site twenty-two years conventionally groundset in a regularly mowed cemetery at the bank of a nondescript Blue Springs, Mo., suburb. Here. Friday. It’s sunny; it’s sunsurface hot, too. Sit, anyway. Bring water. Let time teach that fuzzy edge, what boundary really?, between person and place, a body quickly and slowly (paradoxically quicklyslowly) from that to this, being becoming becoming. And then there’s just earth, prairielike, wind bending grass, or a stone performing durability, a bronze plaque, a few lines, and time’s circlings, bringing me back here without reason (i.e., reason suspended), to visit. And to find a place more than a person, wherever for now along death’s sure reaches.

Facebook entry, September 28, 2019.

About that prairie wind blowing the grass blades, what’s especially striking is how each strand stands again, gets back again on its little rootfeet, bowing to the elements only momentarily, knowing strength (and I mean this as really knowing embodiedly strength). Some of that strength, I suppose, comes from grasping intuitively that we only get this for a little while. The calendar nods.

There’s a numerology blinkered all around this year’s deathdate, a numerology that lurks, gazes, hails, beckons. In its rouletted triviality, something is piqued as serendipitous, though possibly it’s a low-grade poetic flit, possibly a nothing-at-all. Let me try, anyway (not that I’ve got the time; busy AF with work, to-do list is a task-lavishing spawnmonster…though the truer truth is that for this, there’s time more than enough). Mom died when she was 48. I was a few days more than a month into being 23. And now, today, I’m that same measure, a month and six days past turning 46. Math math math, abacus beads don’t fail me now, carry the one: nearly half of this life has gone by without her. Carry on.

The implied hmm and huh in this is with what Louise Phelps wrote to me about a few weeks ago as folded time, a theoretical extension of something from Julavits’ The Folded Clock. It’s that kind of interval-ed co-experience of being an age, some age only now (in this moment for me) mirroring some age only then for another. This stirs an ordinary but marvelous experiential deixis. Then and now, then as now. I remember my mother at 46. That’d have been 1995. A year I started off spending ten–offs!–days in North Kansas City hospital, eleven staples or was it fifteen squeezed pla-chunk into the top of my head at the ER before dawn, early January. A year when I also sat scalpel and scope through three surgeries. A year when I stopped playing college basketball days before the start of what would’ve been my senior season. A year–still in 1995–when my mom was there for me a lot. A lot, a lot.

That’s all I mean by the hmm and huh: noticing a life once folded, first twenty-three years with a mom, next twenty-three years without. Onward, onward, grandbabies and (17-year-brood, is it?) cicadas. Onward looping, onward heart.

Can’t especially much sidestep or neglect to mention that this kind of look-back too means I’ve been a parent for twenty-three years, and whatever kind of parent I was ready to be or not ready to be at that age (there were a thousand generous friends and strangers looking out for us all), it’s what brings us to a now, Ph. at 29, Is. at 13, V., Ph.’s daughter, at 1. Another angle on folded clocks for how in a life they keep folding, relational entanglements and relational accountabilities (an idea best-set by Shawn Wilson), brother-sister, father-son, father-daughter, aunt-niece, and grandfather-granddaughter. Sure do believe it to be true, my mother would’ve marveled.

She’d have been deeply, wrenchingly disturbed, though, by this moment. And she’d not have been complaining but acting, perhaps privately and semi-privately (not online), to sew change. I don’t mean the pandemic, though that’s brought to the fore a measure of static and gnashing, privilege and comfort hard-checked, (ever-more-distant) family members grumping and whining about mask inconvenience and how a basic do-unto-others empathetic regard, call it civility or decency or neighborliness, gets twisted social-media-megaphonic into villainy and fascism. I miss her, but I’m relieved too that (were she with us, abacus, that’d be coming up on the age of 72), she is not around to feel the anguish brought on by such selfish nonsense as has been expressed by relatives. Linda? Oh, she’d have been pissed. She’d have drawn lines. She’d have nevermind Costco Kleenex box wept. She’d have marched. She’d have taken down with force some of this bullshit y’all kinfolk are far too casually espousing. Let me be clear: I’m not saying I knew her best, but I am saying I know this much.

Brings me to another very closely related clock-fold thread, more than a mirage in remembering well my mom’s lessons and values, her priorities for parental consciousness raising, justice, awareness, and accountability to others. Recently I’ve seen some flappings-on in certain small-ish-familial circles about how unfortunate (saddening) are the removals of confederate statues, prospective renamings, and so on. I grant that phrase, “flappings-on,” implies critique. So be it. I don’t have the slightest damn to give about the swift extraction of public monuments or public memorials dedicated anyone who tolerated, promoted, abided, or was otherwise receptive to or amenable with slavery. Clear away all of that ugly and traumatizing shit. Those markers are not teaching history. They’re signaling explicitly the persistence of a dehumanizing value system–and that dehumanization disproportionately applies to some (BIPOC) and not others (white folks). So openly and uncritically sentimentalizing or reveling in public markers rooted in the subjugation of fellow humans, it expresses a reckless and unchecked obtuseness. It’s serially injurious, inscribing legacy fear, legacy pain, legacy nastiness overtly into the commons. It’s an asshole thing to do. Seriously, fuck that.

Ok. Counting to three. Gonna take a breath and try it one other way. Clockfold. It’s June 11, 2020. Murders of Black folks at the hands of police officers (Breonna Taylor, George Floyd), as well as documented lynchings (Ahmaud Arbery) have motivated and recharged civil rights activism, all for the greater good, nothing left to lose, and enough is enough. Breonna Taylor was 26; Ahmaud Arbery, 25. And George Floyd, 46, my age, also tall and a former high school tight end, a dad with a young daughter. A dad, dammit. They should be alive.

Four paragraphs ago I mentioned my son and daughter and granddaughter. There is so much more that can and should be said, that is being said, that must be deliberated over, acted upon, sorted out, made better in light of that last paragraph. But up there four paragraphs ago, where I mentioned Ph. and Is. and V., to those in my family singing woe-song about slipping handles on history due to the sociocultural eviction of atrocity memorials, I have only this scenario to offer. Bracket history for one beat to consider whether you would believe it reasonably safe for Ph. and Is. and V. to drive together to where I live, to pay me a visit, the three of them. Consider it carefully. Their different last names. Their different races. Their unusually different ages. Ph. driving. Their navigating state highways in Ohio, especially southern Ohio, and West Virginia. Consider it. Consider why such a road trip would be terrifyingly precarious, dangerous, risky. And then mull over what you are actively doing to make it otherwise. Give it a minute. Try.

So, here’s where I’ve veered to this morning in the clock-folding. Entirely on (circular) track. I think about my mom often, especially on her deathdate, especially in this particular moment. The personal. The familial. Can’t find in all that introspective deep digging and self-awareness any fire to relate, really? Ask what it would take to make the constant threat and trauma and springloaded trigger-happy state violence–the anguish perpetuated through structural-systemic and targeted dehumanization–personal for you, for those to whom you are accountable.