The Ransomed Heart 5: Seeking the Deep Truth

After rereading Henry James's 768-page Wings of the Dove (considered the author's magnet otis in literary circles), abductor Howard Desseray began to ponder the dove and its low-rent cousin, the pigeon, and to ruminate on their respective symbolic associations.

No criminal was more contemplative, more determined to understand life and all its offerings, as well as his proper role in it, than Desseray. Still, he drew a complete blank on what pigeons symbolized.

Even in the slammer when his fellow inmates were pumping iron in the yard and roughing each other up as boys will, esp. when they're in boys-only company -- this behavior being elegantly depicted in Moby Dick -- even then, in Howard's shameful incarceration, he peered deep inside his soul, spending hours in the joint's library (Howard hated the term "media center") learning from Joel Osteen, Seneca, Kim Kardashian, Cicero, Meister Eckhart, Socrates, Zeno, Tony Robbins, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Ivanka Trump, Plato, Paul Tillich, Norman Vincent Peale, Schopenhauer and every Chicken Soup for the Soul book he could get his hands on.

It isn't overstating all that much to claim that Howard would've been a saint had he lived in another time or in a Flannery O'Connor short story. God knows, he was a diligent seeker, and you can't ask for much more than that. 

From the time he was a child, learning the abduction trade from the man he wrongly assumed was his biological dad, Howard had felt moved to pray, more to make himself a human satellite dish than a transmitter to the stars, desiring only to sense the presence of God, or something in His league, to get some Divine Feedback and elude Hell, should such a thing exist. 

As an abductor, what could he expect from the God of Love? On the one hand, nonstop punishment, but on the other, well, didn't Our Lord HimSelf say He would come like an "abductor in the night," according to the Braxton-Hicks translation? Yes, it was an abductor, not a CEO or school superintendent He compared himself to!

And didn't Howard himself approach his beloved abductee Tally in a similar manner, surprising her, for example, while she was enjoying a Marlboro Menthol Light 100 during a brief break from her rigorous Advanced Placement welding class? Was she not just as taken aback as the people of Noah's time who were joking around, telling Nephilim jokes, and tossing back some Pale Ale Hebrewskis at the local Micro-Hebrewery when suddenly the rains came?

He never assumed that God had much to learn from him (Howard), nor that he could ask the Big Guy to do anything He didn't already know He should do. Should Howard pray, "O Lord, heal my mom, for she has taken ill," the Almighty could be forgiven for responding, "Like I didn't already know that! Helloooo!"

Mainly, Howard just wanted Him to stop hiding, for God's sake. For an abductor, of course, a hiding pre-abductee is the great thief of time, and time is money.

(In the Big House, his cellmate Rufus had turned Howard on to Emily Dickinson, and he agreed with her take on the Almighty: How can He ask us to surrender our autonomy, our name, in a sense, if He's not gonna show His face once in a while?) 

"Hey, Toto," Howard thought to himself, "give the veil a tug and show us what's behind it!"

Miss Ellie Mae Quackenbush, his Sunday-School teacher,  a gentle, well meaning sexagenarian who was a little heavy-handed with the rouge, possibly in an effort to draw attention away from the marble-sized wart on her right eyelid, taught him how to pray -- the stuff with the hands and kneeling and all of that, and she even said it was okay to pray silently, because God could hear inside your head.

Howard's first response was "I'm so screwed," but he let go of his fear and dread, and vowed to make prayer a nightly ritual for the reasons mentioned previously.

What was it like for someone as far down on the food chain as Howard to chat with the Creator of the Universe? Could a lowly (but talented) abductor possess the moral strength, the laser-sharp concentration, the clarity of vision, the purity of thought, the spiritual volition to propel his prayers past Earth's confining atmosphere, outward through the firmament to That Which Is?

The Ransomed Heart 4: A Higher Calling

PREVIOUSLY ON THE RANSOMED HEART: The Dolcets pinch pennies when offering a reward for their daughter Tally's safe return; Howard ponders the timeless nature vs. nurture question; Howard auditions for a Movantic commercial.

And now, Episode 4:

Howard Desseray and his former abductee Tally Dolcet became great friends after he released her. 

They spent a lot of time together, pitching horseshoes, eating oysters on the half shell at Ned & Jed's Fish Camp, attending arena football games, sniffing some corks at Vins somme Nous, and driving Howard's 1965 Buick Riviera through the Citgo car wash, windows down.

Inevitably, they began -- almost simultaneously -- to consider taking their relationship to "another level," meaning, of course, getting married. 

People would talk, they knew that. Her parents would complain that marrying one's abductor was clearly a step down the social ladder. Tally's well-meaning friends would warn her about the likely imbalance of power in a marriage that began as an abduction. 

Her friend Patrice asked her, "Don't you think the submission and powerlessness you felt as an abductee would resurface each time you were confronted with a major decision? Can't you see how you would defer to his wishes, especially if he were holding a roll of duct tape? In his heart, Howard will always see you as a commodity -- chattel, if you will. How will you ever undisempower yourself?"

Tally knew her marriage to Howard wouldn't be a paved highway, but she also knew he was more than just a typical abductor. He was a man of lovingkindness.

She would never forget that he had honored her wish not to be bound and gagged the day he first abducted her, and as their relationship grew warmer, it was she, not Howard who suggested the duct tape.

And she wouldn't be going into the marriage a stereotypically naive welding student. She wasn't in denial. She understood it was what it was. She didn't have her head in the sand. She wasn't blindfolded (anymore) by love. 

In fact, she had read the cold statistics in Ladies' Home Journal that showed the divorce rate among heterosexual abductor-abductee couples was almost as high as that of "normal" heterosexual couples.

So marriage continued to be an option. Consequently, the topic of religion reared its pious head.

Having had little experience with the church, Howard was hesitant on this point. 

His first encounter with the "Lord's House" occurred when, at age 12, he helped his dad abduct a Baptist deacon. As was typical, they put the deacon in the trunk of his dad's Oldsmobile, but did not gag him out of respect for the Almighty, should One exist.

On their way to the secondary crime scene, Howard could hear the muffled sound of the deacon repeatedly crying out to his perceived savior. 

After a few days, the handcuffed deacon settled down and lowered his voice to its normal volume and made a cogent and coherent case for the Dolcets' turning their lives over to Jesus, reminding them that the "truth will set [them] free."

Howard politely declined, citing his desire to "go it on [his] own for a while," his reluctance to make a decision with eternal ramifications at 12, and his ignorance of the world's other major religions. But out of kindness, his dad pretended to convert, even allowing the deacon to pray over him before applying a fresh strip of duct tape over the churchman's mouth.  

Without losing any of this narrative's remarkable fluency, we may now cut directly to Howard on the job secured for him by the now free deacon:  

He and Salvatore, an illegal Mexican immigrant, went from church to church attaching lightning rods to steeple crosses; at churches already equipped with these devices, the boys would inspect and adjust them.  

Religion + Science

As they squatted precariously on the roof's ridge, Howard, mostly to kill time, shared with Salvatore all the deacon had told him about the church being an extension of the loving arms of Christ, a safe haven, a shelter from the storm, a rock of ages, a mighty fortress, all of this offered as an act of grace by a God who had the whole world in his hands, who counteth the hairs on our head and who knew us before he formed us in our mother's belly.

For no apparent reason to Howard, Salvatore softly snickered.

"Anyway," Howard said after concluding his ecclesiastical compendium, "could you hand me the pliers, some duct tape and some super glue? We gotta be sure this thing works when the next thunderstorm comes up."

Salvatore chuckled, then said in broken Spanish (his parents were illegal Swedish immigrants), "No tienes la ironia,¿no?"

"Oh, Sal, it's not iron," Howard said. "Lightning rods are made of either copper or aluminum. These are copper! What the heck do they teach you down there in Mexico?"

Shaking his head at the ignorance of foreigners, his mind drifted back to his beloved Tally and their potentially blissful future together.

SCENES FROM NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE: Howard forgets his glasses on the way to an abduction; he and Tally consider growing their family; Howard finishes rereading Henry James's Wings of the Dove and develops a fondness for pigeons.

The Ransomed Heart 3: Freedom to Act

Having learned in an earlier chapter in his life's narrative that he was adopted (abducted, actually) and was therefore not genetically bound to a life of abducting, Howard Desseray could feel the wind of free will blowing through his hair.

While that wind still blew, playfully ruffling his combination Moe Howard-Ken Burns coiffure, he was reminded of the time he liberated his cousin's pet canary, how he could no longer bear to see the little thing sit in a cage and sing, and impulsively opened its tiny door, then watched it spread its wings and merge with its sylvan home, the canary's yellow feathers soon undulating delicately earthward after encountering its first hungry hawk.

Moe Howard

Howard would make sure he did not make a similar mistake.

Uncaged from genetic determinism, he felt like the story of the man whose wife sent him to Publix to get a box of cereal. "Just any kind," she had said. "Just a box of cereal. Just pick one." 

Long did the man stand in the cereal aisle, mouth agape, scanning the endless rows of brightly colored boxes, till one of the late-night janitors (Howard, remember, hated the word "custodian") found him planted like Michelangelo's David, except clothed and more proportionately endowed, in front of the shredded-wheat section.

"Choosing can be difficult" was the moral of that story, according to the teller.

The canary incident reminded him he already had a bird in hand: he could choose to be an abductor, that vocation being a sort of a Blakean rose-tree as a fallback or safety net for the more exotic "flower that May never bore." 

But then again, abducting was doing, and Howard had learned from Deepak Chopra he (Howard) was a human being, not a human doing. 

Ken Burns

Your talent, your vocation, your work -- that was a mere persona, the you you allowed the world to see. But it's your you deep inside that's really you.

As a young man, Howard possessed wonderful time-management skills, making it possible for him to pursue some of his more creative callings even as he doubled as an abductor and janitor, well before abducting Tally changed his life.

For example, after passing an online course in Stanislavski's method acting, he tried to break into film by auditioning for a Movantic commercial in which his range was severely tested by having to "become," first, a victim of opioid-induced constipation, then, that same person after finding relief from the ponderous malady.

Seeing himself as a modern-day Marlon Brando, Toshiro Mifune, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Andy Dick, Howard transformed his usual abducting self into someone else entirely, a man whose chronic pain has driven him to oxycodone and methadone. Becoming a "constipee," as it is called in medical circles, was rather easy, even if it caused some discomfort and made him unpleasant to be around.

But he struggled with the task of also taking on -- almost simultaneously -- the identity of someone whose natural evacuatory desires have been restored by the miracle of Movantic. With help from an abducted theater student, however, he improved daily and went into the audition with great confidence.

Howard's dreams were dampened when the audition panel found his technique "too naturalistic" and "representational" for the target audience. They claimed he oversold both his "red-faced, teeth-grinding" indication of the "before" condition, and fretted over his choice to play the "after" character as experiencing a kind of spiritual ecstasy, maybe even an apotheosis.

"We're looking for something a little more oblique, a little wry -- tongue-in-cheek, if you will," he was told.

Devastated by this rejection, Howard found himself strolling through his neighborhood, listlessly checking the air pressure of all the tires on all the cars, the intermittent hissing providing the wretched abductor a modicum of relief from his weltschmerz.

But life could not keep Howard down for long. While securing some semblance of sibilant succor from a Hummer, he thought of Kris Kristofferson, Tom Robbins and Epictetus, and their respective aphorisms on the subject of freedom: "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," "Freedom is more important than happiness," and "Only the educated are free."

Howard before (metaphorically)

Yes! Better to be devoured by the hawk of freedom than to "droop his tender wing, . . . forget his youthful spring," and "sit in a cage and sing." He was the sum of his choices! He would choose an authentic life and be the Howard Desseray he was born to be!

Everything was as clear to him as it is to attractive young celebrities who explain Love, Happiness and Hope in People Magazine stories!

He tossed his air gauge into his backpack and hurried home to make his right decision, picking up three dead squirrels on the way for his new collection.

The Ransomed Heart: Genesis

Not long after the "frozen-squirrel scandal,"* Howard Desseray fell into a contemplative mood as do so many men when they approach menopause. 

"Why," he asked, "am I even here? Sure, I led Medford Elementary School's foursquare team to a state championship, but is that enough? The love I share with Tally -- is that the best life on this planet has to offer? Does that fickle emotion -- binding though it may be -- compensate for the suffering we face daily, even when we're not incarcerated?"

Early foursquare uniforms

Most of Howard's life, of course, revolved around abducting people, and he was good at it. 

His dad was an abductor, and one of his fondest childhood memories was riding with him to Home Depot to buy yet another case of duct tape. 

Howard assumed he was genetically predisposed to abduct. He had learned in Ms. Friederstone's biology class that all sorts of traits could be passed down through genetics. Was Howard governed, therefore, by his biology, his every action dictated by a gene pool over which he had no control?

Was this what that one lion in The Lion King meant when he referred to the "great circle of life"? To be free of free will, trapped inside Fate's hamster wheel, stalled on the nadir of the Wheel of Fortune, sucked into a vortex, a swirling, endless loop such as that depicted by Akira Kurosawa's 1957 film version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, starring Toshiro Mifune, Izusu Yamada and Takashi Shimura, shown to Howard's second-grade class for no apparent reason by a sub named Yuki-sensei?

As a child, Howard held out hope that he could take a road that his father had not taken, one that in retrospect he would consider a road less traveled, although, all things being equal, the two were pretty much the same. 

What child wants a career as an abductor?  When Howard was five, abducting was tied with "systems analyst" as the last thing he wanted to become.

It wasn't until he was six that he locked his first-grade substitute teacher -- Ol' Lady Fenstermaker -- in a broom closet, hid the key, then threatened to throw it into Lake Medford unless he was given fat-free yogurt topped with granola for lunch every day for the next week.

His inaugural foray into abduction was a success, but only because Ol' Lady Fenstermaker's ear-piercing refrain of "I'm having a stroke!" inspired school security to bypass the fire department and just get the old woman out of there "toot sweet," meaning they hastily caved in to Howard's demands.

And so it began. Trying futilely to resist his urges, he reluctantly started abducting small pets, then moved quickly to illegal-immigrant yard workers of the very rich, sinking so low as to steal their hoes, then sell them to suckers on Craig's List.

"How long," he cried out to his dad one evening, "Oh, how long must I carry out these reprehensible actions due to the blighted genetic landscape your loins have cursed me with?!"

His dad's shocking response would change Howard's life forever.

(Editor's note: Dear Reader, please look away for a moment to give the suspense a little longer to build. Thanks.)

****

(Okay, you may resume reading.)

First, his dad stunned Howard by telling him, "You got no trace of my genetic makeup in you, boy. You was abducted!"

And while the poor kid was still reeling, he added, "And finding your biological origins is gonna be sort of tough on account of I abducted you from an orphanage."

Suddenly, Howard seemed to be standing atop a bottomless pit, not on the side of it, but the part that isn't made of anything, i.e., the top of the hole where the pit starts, the pit actually being a hole by definition.

Grimly, he realized that, like the words "copacetic" and "dildo," he was a thing without a known origin.

For months, he spent a huge chunk of every day online -- on HoosierDaddy.org, chiefly -- trying desperately to find the all-natural source of his life's journey, but to no avail. 

And what impact would this revelation have on his future plans, including his relationship with his former abductee Tally? These and other answers will be provided in future installments, should there be any.

*Described in detail in Chapter 2, most of this incident was lost during the Great Ransomware Cyber-Attack of 2017. From the few passages that survived, we can surmise that bobby pins and super glue played major roles in the story.

The Ransomed Heart

Howard Desseray, a specialist in abducting, was not much respected by his colleagues in crime. The few times he did time in the joint, his fellow prisoners responded with contempt to his Disneyesque recounting of his so-called atrocities.

"Gosh," they would say. "Those are not bad things you did. You hardly deserve to be here, for Pete's sake! Crap!"

And when he was put back on the street, law-abiding citizens would fearlessly mock him, at Target, church, and the playground: "Ooooo! There's Mr. Abductor!," well-adjusted citizens would say, "I'm sooo scared!" 

But Howard was unfazed by this ribbing. He knew who he was. He was "comfortable in his own skin" -- a phrase he had learned while reading Oprah magazines in the Crowbar Hotel.

He was such a nice guy that even judges couldn't take him seriously. When he was found guilty, he would often receive nothing more than a slap on the wrist -- literally. The judge would nod at the bailiff who would then take Howard's arm, slap his wrist -- twice if the abductee was a minor -- and send him on his way.

As an abductor, Howard wasn't choosy about age or sex. And as for sex, Howard never got the appeal, didn't see what all the fuss was about, what's the big deal, so what? Why do something like that unless, of course, you wanted children, and since he saw himself as a criminal, he felt morally obligated not to pass on his genetic make-up. "That's just how I was brought up," he told investigators. 

So his abductees could relax on the sexual front. Even as he was gently applying the duct tape over a victim's mouth, he would assure him or her, "Don't you worry about 'you know what.' I'm not into that scene." 

Whether he abducted a runaway teen or a kindergarten kid or a deranged old coot on the lam from an assisted-living facility, he never hurt them. 

Howard simply needed a little extra dough here and there to fuel and maintain his swanky 1965 Buick Riviera. Occasionally,  when his massive tires began to lose their tread, he would break down and get a job like a normal person, usually as a janitor (he hated the term "custodian") at a daycare, but would soon be fired for the many days he missed while abducting people.

Howard's Riviera

Always considerate, he was well known for giving his captives healthy snacks while they waited for their parents or caretakers to miss them. Grilled-cheese sandwiches smeared with guacamole was one of his favorites, along with tofu cubes floating in a bowl of unsalted vegetable broth. He would encourage but not force them to eat a few olives because "they have the good kind of fat."

The only thing the least bit weird about Howard was that, in the room where he locked his victims, he had a large freezer full of dead squirrels he collected from tree-lined streets winding through suburban neighborhoods. On the freezer was taped a piece of printer paper with "For Later Use" scrawled in huge purple letters. 

The real story here, though, is Tally Dolcet, his current abductee. Shortly after he seized her while she was enjoying a smoke break from her welding class, she asked nicely not to be bound and gagged, so he gently escorted her to the usual room, whipped up the ol' cheese'n'guac, turned the TV on to Lifetime, and the two small-talked casually until her parents called, as they had been instructed to do.

Before the freezer

After the usual brief negotiation, Howard wished Mr. and Mrs. Dolcet "a blessed day," then turned to Tally, a huge smile revealing almost all his remaining teeth. "I can NOT believe this! They're gonna give me $25,000 to release you! All's I said was, 'Make me an offer!' This is the happiest day of my life! I'm gonna have the most rockin' Riviera in town. Grab your cigarettes and welding helmet, sister, you are headed home!"

Tally's face reflected neither delight nor relief. As she sauntered over to the squirrel freezer, she appeared to be trying to conjure some distant memory. She opened the door part way, and gazed at the many lifeless tree rodents, frozen in time due to an obscure law of nature that kicks in once the temperature falls below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Howard, if you were to have children, and they were taken from you by someone like you, what would you give to get them back?"

"Until your parents hand over the 25k, I don't have much to give. But once I got the wampum, I'd give'm that."

"All of it? All $25,000?"

"Hey, it's my kids you talking about. The fruit of my own loins! Heck, I'd give'm my Riviera."

"How about your frozen squirrels?"

"I'd hafta to think about that, but right now I'm leaning toward it. They're for later use, you know."

Tally gently shut the freezer door, remaining motionless except for tapping her fingers on its surface. "Howard, I learned in an American History course that a female slave in the Old South would cost as much $120,000 in today's currency. Why am I worth less than a slave?"

"Probably, if you work in food and feminine products, girl slaves cost a heckuva lot more'n that," Howard said. "In your case, though,I reckon the $25,000 would cover the few cheese'n'guacs you ate. And you haven't used any feminine products that I know of, even though I do keep some on hand for when I abduct pre-mennies, as I call'em.

"Plus your folks are probably thinking they already pretty much own you in a biological sense, plus you already ate up a good chunk of your life, so they're not really buying the whole you. Did you wear braces?"

"Yes."

"Okay, right there you got another $7,000 dollars."

"Howard, Howard. What, really, is the value of a human life?"

"They's a whole buncha theories on that, Tally. Why, you look back at the Anglo-Saxon days and they had this thing called wergild, that laid out how much a fellow would cost. Let's say I abducted and killed your uncle. Now, you can kill my uncle and we're all done here, but if I don't have an uncle, I gotta pay you whatever an uncle was going for at the time. That payment was called wergild. 

"Things have changed since then, of course. I read in the Huffington Post just the other day that $6 million is the current value of a human life, before taxes, that is, and if you live within our borders. If you get shot up accidentally by our military, it could be as little as $6,000. But if you really want to hit the jackpot, get somebody to video you changing your clothes in a hotel room, and you'll be awarded somewhere in the neighborhood of $55 million. Just ask Erin Andrews! Your dignity is worth a lot more than a normal person thinks it is!

"But if you's picky about dollars and cents, you'd wanna get down to what they call 'value theory,' and its branches like 'consequentialism' and 'axiology,' and distinguish between intrinsic and instrumental value, as well as relational, now that I think of it. Nuther words, what is your value in and of yourself, compared to your value to those who know you? 

"I think you might want to factor in investments and holdings and such, too, in most cases. Like if you own a house -- I know you're too young for that -- how much of it do you still owe? And is your car paid for? And what are your stock vestments likely to yield according to the Wall Street Journal?

"Anyway, what I'm really saying is, folks don't think twice about laying out $657,000 for a bigger house than the one they living in, but you take a young'un from them and out comes the calculator to see how much they can pay without it pinching too much. Then they gotta do research on what other folks of their income level forked out to retrieve their beloved offspring. Nothing's more shameful than, say, offering a reward that's less than the ones your neighbors offered for their missing kid!

"Dang it (forgive my language), Tally, you got me thinking too much. I ain't earned any $25,000, and you worth much more'n that anyhow. I think they's an opening for a janitor at the elementary school over on Medford Avenue, so I'm gonna go check it out. Abducting ain't no way to make a living. Something just don't feel right anymore."

Nothing was ever the same for Howard and Tally after this incident. Howard did such good work as a janitor, he was quickly promoted to Assistant Principal in Charge of Abduction Prevention (APAP), and received frequent grants to conduct in-services on "Cryogenics and the Sciurus Carolinensis," along with coaching the kids on "four square" during their 10-minute recess.

But in the Dolcet household, the tension was so icy it reminded Tally of Howard's frozen squirrels. Members of that well-kept suburban home-turned-igloo communicated only when necessary, and then only with nods and gestures, and they never broached the topic of the parents' paltry, piddling, penny-pinching pittance of a parsimonious payoff.

Did Tally die a bitter, resentful hard-hearted welder or did she quietly find her way back to Howard, and stand bravely by his side, supporting him as he aspired to achieve fame as a public school administrator without wearing an orange jumpsuit, and standing by his side each time he relapsed into his life as an abductor, "the nice one who drives a 1965 Buick Riviera"?

These and other questions will be answered in the next installment, should there ever be one.   

William & Harry & the Last Things

Harry Morris, my Shakespeare professor at Florida State, was not likable. He made sure of that.

He was pedantic, fussy, punctilious. A misplaced comma or period in a bibliography made him furious, and as a result the writer's grade would wilt and wither from Harry's wrath.

When he directed a dissertation or thesis, he became his student's worst enemy, seeming to wish him harm. He fed on the poor bastard's fear and his failure.  

Aside from my Chaucer professor Eugene Crook, I'm not sure any of his colleagues cared much for him, either.

Harry loved Shakespeare so much he was a bit irritated that there were 20-something students in the room while he read the plays aloud from the yellowed pages of his Kittredge texts pasted onto notebook paper to allow more room for annotation.

In my two undergraduate courses with him, he read almost all of each play we studied, changing voices and cranking up the volume at critical points – sometimes so powerfully that some of us worried that he may be suffering a breakdown right there in front of us.

With a silky whisper, in hushed reverence, he would sing those ditties from the comedies, even the ones that included the annoying refrain, "With a hey, and a ho, and hey nonny no!" After one of these brief recitals, many young scholars could be seen biting their fingers till they leaked blood in an effort to keep from laughing out loud.

He, not we, would intermittently interrupt his performance with many insights and bits of research he had dug up while writing a series of essays and finally a book on the Bard’s eschatological vision: Last Things in Shakespeare.

So, yes, he saw the Bard's works through a filter smeared with Church of England doctrine and mostly Catholic iconography. Many of Harry's students believed Shakespeare might be up to something a little more universal than that, something more than continuous, complex, multilayered, sophisticated proselytizing, and they therefore resented "Father Harry's" narrow vision.

Most of his students resented his teaching style, esp. since the embers were still glowing from the Sixties when students demanded greater involvement in their education so they could learn, without grades, through Happenings, Role Playing, Teach-Ins, and Calling Professors by their First Names. 

Did Harry encourage class participation? Interactive learning? Socratic questioning? Group work? 

No. Let me rephrase: Hell no! Harry has yet to establish eye contact with a student, and it is my understanding he has been dead for a couple of decades.

When someone raised a hand, Harry would let out an impatient sigh and look away from the student in thinly disguised disgust while pointing toward her in a way that was supposed to say “Go ahead,” but really said, “Go away. Please jump out the window directly behind you.” 

Harry dressed as if he had just popped in on his day off to pick up a forgotten book. Even though he was in his late fifties (he looked like I thought an ageing Woody Allen would look, only he was taller and heavier, and had a bigger nose), he wore jeans, scuffed low-cut hiking shoes with white socks (a terrible fashion misstep in the early Seventies), and any old kind of button-up shirt. 

The few times I had the nerve to visit him during his office hours, which he rarely kept, he had his feet up on his desk and his hands locked behind his head, and he held that position for the duration of my nervous stammering. I remember he used the word "harangue," which I had never heard before. There was no small talk. He was interested chiefly in my leaving, not my learning. 

Ecce homo! Here is a man who, figuratively and literally, failed and frustrated most of his students. 

I was crazy about him.

As a bashful junior just finding his way in the academic world, I was mesmerized by the depth of his learning, and I had no desire to interrupt his show with questions or comments of my own, comments that could only appear pretty lame compared to his. Nor did I want any of my classmates to share their questions, thoughts or feelings.

Here was my philosophy of education at the time: “I’m personally paying my college tuition to get as much knowledge as possible from people who have been studying literature all of their adult lives. So could the rest of you shut up, let Professor Morris talk, and let me write down every word of it because, first, I’m fascinated by this stuff, and second, I can use it all someday when I grow up to be a teacher."

"Educationalists" are quick to point out how little information from lectures students retain. But sitting here chatting with you, 43 years later, I can easily recall a good handful of words and terms Harry introduced me to: Memento mori, ubi sunt, eschatology, miles gloriosus, anagogical, acedia, Literature of the Divine Rebellion, Et in Arcadia Ego, topsy-turvy universe, et al (oh, and et al).

Furthermore, my path crossed with Harry's on other grounds. As a recovering Southern Baptist, I was trying my hand as an Episcopalian, and one Sunday at the 8 a.m. service, I saw Harry -- in jeans, Goodwill shirt, hiking shoes, white socks -- kneeling on a hassock, his head bowed, checking in with his Maker, I guess, about the Four Last Things -- you know: death, judgment, heaven and hell.

A few months before I enrolled in my first class with Harry, my dad had died, and it dawned on me just now that Harry partially filled that vacuum for a while: Like my dad, he knew everything and hoarded compliments as if they were gold. Probably another reason I felt at home in his presence.

Reminiscing about Harry, I think of kairos as I so often do in these pieces. He taught me that word, and hence I understand more clearly how a teacher like him contributed so heavily to my Four Great Things: reading, writing, thinking, teaching. Harry caught me at the one time in my life that I would listen to him. The student was ready, and the teacher reluctantly appeared.

Finally, some things in "real life" are too literary to include in a piece of writing, and what follows is one of those things, but I'm including it anyway because it is both factual and true, history and myth: 

After work, Harry was an avid bird watcher, often roaming the north Florida woods with his binoculars. During work, a Starling (sturnidae) watched him and inched a little closer to flying free.