The two of us as college showbiz big shots.
1:20 p.m. From one of the 149 seats in room 101 of Linsly Chittenden Hall on Yale’s old campus, I watch as students arrive a few minutes early for class. Two of them, standing near the lectern, begin an animated conversation. This sparks a memory, and a curiosity. Will these two know each other 60 years from now? Will they, in their dotage, recall taking Daily Themes, a course in the English Department dating back to 1907? More importantly, will they rely on each other through the years for kindness and mutual support?
1:21 p.m. The Daily Themes professor places a pile of handouts of examples of the week’s focus: how writers use physical description to enhance their narratives. I am in a corner of the room commonly occupied by the tutors. Then my cellphone, which I’ve put on silence, vibrates. As the class start is still eight minutes away, I take a moment to see if there is an update from hundreds of miles to the west, in Columbus, Ohio.
1:22 p.m. The text is from Jane Mead. She says of her husband, in hospice, “Ron is in passing stage.” I had feared this, though at my age I am a veteran of taking in such news, or for actually seeing the act of dying for myself in war and peace. This death, though, stands apart from so many of the others. Ronald D. Mead — bosom buddy, college pal, comic genius, sympathetic friend among friends to whom I could tell things that, with a therapist, I could sashay around.
1:23 p.m. I need to get there, to see him, to talk to him while he still breathes. Last night I spent more time than necessary discovering all of the inconvenient ways to do so from New Haven. Our handy airline, Avelo, flies nowhere near Columbus. I could go via North Carolina from Hartford’s Bradley International, or buy a ticket for the only direct flight from anywhere near here, on Spirit Airlines, out of LaGuardia. But I checked the weather. And the prediction for New York City indicated that the airport could be snowed in, as if Mother Nature had suddenly become arbiter of private affairs, as so often happens.
1:24 p.m. I think of the weeks we worked together in my junior year in Athens, Ohio, to write, direct, and produce the school’s annual “Varsity Show,” a satirical musical revue. Ron and I pulled several all-nighters, ordering pizza at 3 a.m., thinking we were brilliant playwrights, and then, in the early hours, reading our work and wondering who were the idiots wrote those sophomoric words of dialogue. Ron surely would recall the complicated production of the revue. That I had to fire the set designer because he didn’t deliver, which turned Ron and me into dark-of-night thieves. We snuck into the music building and stole the backdrops for concerts on which we could paint the setting. A violation, certainly, of the dean of student’s declaration of noble behavior. Nowadays, my tutees at Yale look at my old gray head and must think that I’ve always led an honorable life or I wouldn’t be on the Yale payroll. Hah. (Note to readers: The dean of music forgave us, with the simple request to whitewash them and bring them back when we struck the set.)
1:25 p.m. The revue, which we titled, “Things Are A Lot More Like They Are Now Than They Were Two Years Ago,” was a hit, drawing thousands to the auditorium, and Ron was the star. The audience lost it, rolling side to side in hysterics, as he spent four minutes wrestling with a folding chair. And it did so when he played the host of a mock quiz show. Two contestants, a husband and wife, had just won the grand prize: an atomic bomb, and were, of course, thrilled. What household doesn’t need one? But Ron then asked them, “Do you believe in Adam and Eve?” When they nodded, he said, “Do you believe we’re all descended from Adam and Eve?” They said yes. Ron shook his head, and said, “I’m sorry, folks, relatives of the sponsor are not eligible.”
1:26 p.m. No attendance is taken in the Daily Themes class. It’s just presumed the students will be there. If they were curious enough to enroll, and if they wanted to get their A minuses in the age of grade inflation, they have to know what’s going on. As the years pass in this course, I always find that almost all of them are earnest in their efforts, want to learn, and impress me with not only their native talents and courtesies. They are of an age when they, too, could do something crazy like write a satirical musical revue and forget for a few weeks they are students and should go to class.
1:27 p.m. The time is ticking. I must at least talk to Ron. After class may be too late. But I content myself for the moment by thinking of Joe Eszterhaus. He was a classmate, too. And he went on to become the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood (“Jagged Edge,” “Basic Instinct,” “Flashdance,” “Show Girls,” etc.). Back in 1964, though, he wrote reviews for the Ohio University Post, the daily student newspaper. He could be a harsh critic. Indeed, of our Varsity Show, Joe referred to as the Junior Varsity Show, but he praised Ron as a guy who will have a bright future as a performer. In the years that followed, I always expected to read of Ron’s showbiz triumphs — I thought of him as the midwestern Dick van Dyke — but there was never such material.
1:28 p.m. He had lived, nevertheless, a performer’s life as a teacher who taught federal employees and others about conflict resolution, driven by memories of growing up in chaos in Ashtabula, Ohio. After many personal struggles, he found his wife to be, Jane, and a mega-church that gave them both comfort. In Arizona, he became a college teacher of English, and published a book, “A Concise Grammar Book for Those Who Hate Grammar,” which spent considerable time discussing the difference between a colon and semi-colon, and similar linguistic riddles. When I read it, I thought of one of the Dick van Dyke roles in “Mary Poppins,” the ancient bank owner who died laughing when he finally got the joke: “I once knew a man with a wooden leg named Smith. And the other fellow says, ‘What was the name of his other leg?’” The cover shows Ron in his performance mode – his hair sticking straight up from fright, indicating how the necessary particulars of writing well can scare anyone who tries to do it.
1:29 p.m. I can’t wait till after class. I call Jane. She says I can speak to him. He won’t be able to respond, but he’ll hear my voice. She puts her phone to his ear. I have not rehearsed what I will say, and so the first lines come out in junior varsity fashion. “Hi buddy. I’m thinking of you. Um. Um. And sending hugs. And thinking about our days together. Um…” I am still, I guess, a follower of the western tradition that we deny the idea of expressing death, and we don’t say, “Have a fine time in the Great Beyond, pal. I know a great harp teacher who passed recently, and you should look her up.” We can say, however, “I love you.” Which I did. Jane tells me that Ron smiled.
1:30 p.m. The class has started. I put the phone back in my man-purse. As Arthur Miller’s protagonist in “Death of a Salesman” would say, attention must be paid. The lecture on description begins. Life goes on, as news of a life’s ending lurks.
The two of us in reunion many decades later.