Marticke Lecture
Western Reserve
Academy
8 April 2016
Is Anybody Listening?
It’s an honor to be here today—just as it
always has been. I stood here for the
first time in the spring of 1980—that’s thirty-six years ago for those of you who (like me) are mathematically
challenged—and I am grateful, once again, to have the privilege of … trembling … on the very spot where so
many wonderful speakers have loosed upon you the wolfhounds of their language and ideas. (BTW—remember “wolfhounds”;
later, you'll see why.)
I’d like, especially, to thank Ruth Andrews
for inviting me today, to Abbey Baker for finalizing everything, to Sherry
Chlysta for that generous introduction, to Jill Evans and her English II-ers
with whom I just shared a great class, to Headmaster Burner, and, especially,
to the Marticke family for sponsoring this annual event, an event that has
become—in not all that many years—an important part of the life—the vigorous intellectual life—of Western Reserve
Academy.
And it’s nice to see some of you students whom
I know from the Open Door Coffee Company. Seeing you down there is one small
way I stay in touch with Reserve, a place I’ve loved for a long, long time. As
I said last year on this very spot, it gives me hope when I see you studying, caring.
But … well … you could offer me
some of your pastry? (My mommy taught me it’s polite to share! Just saying …)
Also nice to see some former colleagues—some
of whom, once upon a time, were my students here: Mr. Ong (English III), Mrs.
Bormann (English I). For years I’ve been
blackmailing them both. (Mr. Ong,
your April payment is late!)
And hello to Mr. Butensky-Bartlett, whose
father, one of my great college friends, served as an usher at my wedding in
December 1969. Some students told me they call you BB. Well, BB, I’m DD. Welcome
to the Reserve Alphabet Club!
And hello, of course, to my wife, Joyce. She taught
here from 1979–1990, the year our son graduated. I’m thrilled they’re here. Thrilled
and safe. Why safe? Because … now… someone will
have to tell me I did a good job! Oh,
the lovely lies that lovers must
tell!
I first came here to teach in the fall of
1979. I’d already taught a dozen years at the middle school over in Aurora—a wonderful
place, by the way. And then, in 1977, having finished my Ph.D., I thought: I’m gonna be a professor! I
applied for a lot of jobs. Got one.
At Lake Forest College just up the lake from Chicago, and off I went with my
family (our son had just turned six). I was going to begin my career as an Intellectual.
It didn’t work out.
You may find this hard to believe, but I missed middle school kids (I’d taught 7th
graders, mostly). Missed their energy, their devotion. Their fundamental insanity. I needed me some more!
So after that single year at Lake Forest
College I tried to get back to Aurora, but the middle school had no openings. So
I applied a few other places in the area, including Reserve, which hired both
my wife and me. As I said, she would stay till 1990 (you can see her picture over
in Seymour), and I lasted exactly … two years. In 1989 I got in a little … kerfuffle
about my salary, and—in a huff—I abruptly
quit, worked some part-time jobs for a year, among them: teaching freshman
English at Kent State and clerking down at The Learned Owl, owned at the time
by your Headmaster’s parents.
In the
fall of 1982 I finally got back to Aurora and taught eighth graders there until
my retirement in January 1997. Afterwards, I ran around for a few years, not
unlike a released balloon—traveling, reading, writing, feeling almost delirious with the freedom to do what I
wanted to.
Then, in April 2001 I was downtown having
coffee at the old Saywell’s Drug Store (RIP) with good friend Tom Davis, the
now-retired chair of the English Department here. He was sort of whimpering,
“We have three openings in English
for next year.”
I thought a minute (maybe less than a minute) and said, “How about
two?”
And that less-than-a-minute of thought—no, impulse—led to one of the most enjoyable
decades of my life—2001–2011. Back at Reserve after a twenty-year absence.
That first year, 2001–02, Keir Marticke was a
senior here. Although I did have a
few seniors that year in what they used to call “Senior Seminar,” Keir was not among
them. But she was a presence on the
campus, I can tell you that. I
remember her in morning meetings and on campus; I remember thinking that she
seemed … at peace with herself—not a
common quality in the turbulence of youth. (My own, I’ll confess, was sometimes
seismic; my mom, now 96, has still not forgotten—or forgiven—those quakes of mine that shook our house.)
If you look at Keir’s senior page in the 2002
Hardscrabble, you’ll see a line from
a 1990s pop song by Ari DiFranco: If
you’re born a lion, don’t bother trying to act tame. And then Keir's own words: Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen. She has ten pictures
on her page, and eight of them show
Keir with some of those who had helped
make it happen.
And so—again—I’m honored to speak at an event
that bears Keir’s name.
Okay, a couple of stories now. Stories that
will illustrate what I’m going to focus on this morning—well, insofar as I can
focus on anything at my age!
Story
One:
It was the fall of 1966. Aurora, Ohio. Aurora
Middle School. I was in the very first weeks
of my teaching career and was feeling very … professional. I was 21! A
legal adult! I had a briefcase
(a gift from my grateful parents—He's out
of the house!)! I had a couple of neckties!
I had an apartment! A car! A salary (on the first and the fifteenth of each month I got a fat paycheck—$168.42; I was rolling in it)! My seventh-grade
students listened to me! (Well, sort
of.)
One late afternoon in early fall I attended a
district-wide teachers’ meeting. At one point, I leapt to my feet and uttered
some very forgettable words about a topic I’ve also forgotten. But I do remember this: I was urgent; I was earnest, maybe even passionate. I sat down, very pleased
with myself, with my first professional
remarks. I was gonna change some
things!
But immediately thereafter, one of the
veteran elementary school teachers, an older woman (probably ten years younger than I am now), bellowed out in
her playground voice: “Now, we can all ignore
what that boy just said ….”
BOY!
Did she say BOY? She
went on, but I’ve suppressed the rest of it. Deeply suppressed it. But still—I’ve never forgotten that boy. I huffed and I puffed and
wished I could blow her house down.
Story
Two:
Fast forward about fifty
years. Last Father’s Day (2015) Joyce and I drove down to nearby Green, Ohio, to
visit our son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons, Logan and Carson (10 and 6 at
the time). It was a warm day, and just before we left their place, we started
shooting hoops out in their driveway.
Now—for this part you're going to need some imagination: I’d been a pretty decent
basketball player, back in my high school days. FYI—my senior year, 1962, I was on the county
all-star team. No need to stand and applaud. It wasn’t all that great an honor.
Back then, Portage County was full of small schools with small players with
small talent.
Anyway, after a few minutes in our son’s
driveway, the Old Rhythm came back, and I was sinking shots with shocking
regularity. I was In the Zone!
Logan—the ten-year-old, and a very good player—was stunned (he’d never really seen
me shoot before), and when he came over to guard me, I whipped a long
behind-the-back pass to my son. Chest-high. Perfect.
Logan stopped and sighed, deeply.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
And he said these immortal words: “Old guys
aren’t supposed to be any good.” He was smiling, kidding, ironic, I knew. So I
laughed.
Okay, what these two little stories show, I
hope, is a simple and sometimes painful truth: People don’t really listen to
you much when you’re young; they
don’t listen to you much when you’re old.
So you have a few decades, if you’re lucky, when people will consider you
neither an infant/child/adolescent/BOY—or a dotard. And maybe—just maybe—listen a little.
(Okay—pause for an English-teachery word, dotage, one I always put on my English
III vocab list: a state or period of
senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness. A dotard is someone in that period.)
Oh, and there’s a similar word like dotage for you—nonage: a period of youth.
So—between our nonage and our dotage—it’s
possible that people will actually
listen to us. Or not. (No guarantees.) So I guess the next question is When that time arrives, what are you
going to say? And how? … We’ll come back to that.
But first, let’s take a quick look at these
two extremes—nonage, dotage. When you’re young, it’s often true, isn’t it, that
no one’s really listening? Oh, sure, when you’re a wee one, people will ask
you if you want some juice—will ask you about kindergarten and your pet—or if
you have to go p-p—but here are some questions I’m guessing none of you ever
heard directed your way in early childhood: What
do you think about our reliance on fossil fuels? Or: In Macbeth, what would be the
metaphorical significance of having the three witches remain on stage the whole
time? You get the picture …
The same thing happens when you’re much older.
Let’s use my dad, for example. Edward Dyer. Now, you’ll need just a little background
for this story to sink in as deeply as I want it to. Born in 1913, Dad grew up
on an Oregon farm, the second oldest of eleven
kids. When he was about your age, his own father died. So during the Great
Depression he went to work to help support the family. But he also began
college, worked his way through. Eventually earned a bachelor’s, two master’s
degrees. Got married in 1939, began his career as a preacher. Then … December
7, 1941 … Pearl Harbor. He joined the Army, became a chaplain, earned a Bronze Star
for bravery, served both in the South Pacific and in Europe. Back home after
the War, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma, switched his
profession to Teacher Education. Then came the Korean War in the early 1950s.
Called back to active duty, he was stationed for two years at Amarillo Air
Force Base in Texas. When that war
ended, he returned to university teaching and ended his career out at Drake
University in Des Moines, Iowa, as an associate dean of the graduate school. He
and Mom retired out on the Oregon coast; then health problems felled him, so
they moved to Massachusetts, near my two brothers. Dad died in November 1999. I
miss him every single day. When I
taught here, I wore his academic gown
every year at Commencement.
Now, here’s what I’m getting at … when I would
go out to Massachusetts to visit him in his assisted-living unit, and, later,
in the nursing home, some of his caretakers would talk to him like this: Hi, Ed! How’s your pudding today?
That sort of thing. All of his
history—his magnificent history
(farm, Depression, World War II, graduate degrees)—was either unknown or
forgotten or irrelevant. He was a toddler again, in many of his caretakers’
eyes, an attitude expressed not just with words
but with tone of voice … how’s your pudding today?
Let’s invite Mr. Shakespeare to comment here
… he always seems to have something to say—though we can’t always understand it, can we? Of course, if he
were to materialize this afternoon down at Open Door and sit with some of you,
he wouldn’t be able to understand a thing
you were talking about—or a thing
that he saw or experienced. (Except tables, chairs, and the like.) Your clothes,
haircuts, smart phones (What are your
thumbs doing?); your food, your drinks—even your smells—would baffle him. (And how's that
music coming out of the ceiling?) In order for him to
communicate with you (which, surely,
he wants to do—otherwise, what’s he doing at Open Door—looking for the
Bachelorette?), he would have to learn your
vocabulary, your culture—would have
to catch up on world history since 1616, the year he died. And, likewise, if we
want to understand him, we have to grant
him the same courtesy. Not always
easy, I’ll grant you. But worth it.
Okay … keeping it a hundred. When I read
Shakespeare in high school—Julius Caesar
my sophomore year, Macbeth my
senior—I hated every second of it. I just could not get it, and at that point in my life, I figured if I couldn’t get
it—right away—well, it obviously wasn’t worth
getting. Take this little speech from Caesar,
delivered by Brutus:
BRUTUS:
Swear priests and cowards, and men cautelous,
Old
feeble carrions, and such suffering souls
That
welcome wrongs: unto bad causes swear
Such
creatures as men doubt. (2.1)
What
the—? Reading that in tenth
grade, I realized I despised
Shakespeare. Always would.
Then things changed. Much of that change is
Reserve’s fault. When I came to teach here in 1979, English I (which I taught) included
… Julius Caesar (NO!) and English III (which I also taught), Hamlet (IMP0SSIBLE!). So
… not wanting to look like a dolt in front of my students, I started to work on
Shakespeare—and I’ve never stopped. Joyce and I have seen every single one of
his three dozen plays onstage (some of them many times); I’ve visited his
birthplace, read all the plays and sonnets and other poems multiple times, memorized
lots of his lines, read many biographies …. I’ve stood by his grave at Holy
Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
And speaking of that grave … the 400th
anniversary of Shakespeare’s death is very near—on April 23rd. You
may have heard the news that the church recently granted permission to some
researchers to conduct a sophisticated radar scan of the grave. And one of
their first discoveries: His skull appears
to be missing! Purportedly taken by souvenir hunters in the late 1700s. And
just last week I read that one of the supposed head-snatchers was named Dyer! I
don't know whether to be ashamed or proud?!?
To be continued ...
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