something about fathers

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something about fathers topic started 6/22/2005; 5:37:05 PM last post 6/22/2005; 5:37:05 PM

hiser@h... - something about fathers   6/22/2005; 4:37:05 PM (reads: 2139, responses: 0) As his conference assistant, I traveled to Urbana with John to read proposals and meet all the NCTE people. For a recent comp. grad this trip to "headquarters" was about as exciting as life can get. After the week in Urbana, John drove me up to my parents house in northern illinois, where I spent about 10 days with my parents before I had to return to California to start planning the conference. I was so glad I made that trip, because two days after I got home, my father died. Suddenly, like this. I went back to the funeral, of course, but when I returned to california there were all these index cards with CCCC panels on them, and they had to be arranged, and coded, and indexed, and put into "threads". John and I had a conference room at De Anza, where we spread out all these cards and walked around and around the tables trying to envision this conference. It was hot, and sunny, and on these days John hardly talked at all (and you know, he was a big talker). For this whole surreal week I tried to understand how my dad could be dead, and somehow being around John, arranging and rearranging these cards, was just the exactly perfect place to be. Knowing that John had lost a son, and I had lost a parent, made us like a perfect match. I remember sitting on a bench at De Anza, with John, and a blue butterfly kind of spiraled by, and I thought how incredible it was that there were butterflies, but I had no dad. But I did have John, and meaningful work to do, and that was good. John had more ideas and enthusiasm than anybody I've ever met. He could really talk and talk and talk, so you couldn't get a word in edgewise, but from John, everything he said was so wild and interesting (from a compositionist's perspective anyway) that it was just so enjoyable to me, to just listen, kind of floating along on this river of energy he projected. John was a mentor to me, as I know he was to many. When I applied for a position at a two-year college in Hawaii, I know he was happy, and I know he influenced my committment and attitude towards teaching in a two-year college. He wrote me a letter of recommendation that I've never read, and I want to go hunt down those words now in my file, like some lost communicative exchange. I want to read every back-issue of his blog. I'm so glad that he used words the way he did, so that there are so many of them around for us to work with. John understood the significance of the act of composing writing, and honestly, sitting here posting to this website, with tears stinging my eyes and sadness choking my throat, I feel the significance of writing in a way that I know John felt it every day, in every email, blog, article, and student paper comment. The world shifted for me when my father died, and I can feel that for me, it just shifted again. I'm not sure what it adds up to, but I'm sure it has something to do with teaching comp. aloha John, Krista Discuss