MORE BETTER THAN HEARSAY - The Professor and a Lingering Memory

ICEVILLE - I wasn’t cut out for college, though I did go for a semester or two, leaving after getting a failing grade in an English Literature class.

The assignment was to compare Shakespeare to some other guy and the mere thought of my life ticking away, doing it, nearly drove me to drink.

Instead, I wrote a sonnet to Shakespeare, thanking him for the beauty of his sonnets, which was no easy chore, I might add.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, little poems, are a certain style, fourteen lines in length and following a specific rhyme scheme, using iambic pentameter (whatever that is).

Each sonnet is three quatrains with a final rhyming couplet (whatever that means), and Shakespeare’s tend to have an emotional twist at the end.

Obviously, I didn’t know any of that, starting out, and the only reason I can recite all that stuff now is because I looked it up again, but I grabbed my trusty pen and paper and followed the pattern to a “T.”

I got an “F” for my trouble, including a note in bright red ink informing me that wasn’t what was asked of me, as if I didn’t realize that, so I told the teacher to compare education to utter boredom and walked out.

Brash and rude, I do realize, and the instructor was a decent fellow who definitely knew his subject but I was 19 and hellbent on something that seemed right at the moment and never looked back.

And then there was - and still is - my Creative Writing professor, Cliff Wexler, who recently reached out to me after all these years.

Actually, we have been in touch now and again since I departed dear old Columbia-Greene Community College which, then, was in its infancy.

CGCC was born in a quaint brick building that I believe was once a school. It had wide, creaky wooden stairways, and still does, now serving as the municipal hall and courtroom in the river town of Athens.

Many of my hours there were spent in the basement which, as I recall, was a gymnasium with a stage on one side, like small schools used to have.

An upright piano was tucked in one corner. I’d tickle the ivories, coming up with one of my first songs, a bluesy tune called “Jerry in the Country.” 

It was about a guy I knew who married young and was blue-collar working really hard and the chorus went like this…

“Thinking of Jerry in the country, wondering if he’s happy. Thinking of Jerry in the country, wondering what to do myself.”

Professor Wexler had given us a writing task. Rather than put pen to paper, I dragged him down to the basement and played “Jerry in the Country.”

He has never said whether he liked the song but that isn’t what mattered most. He got it. He saw the effort and burgeoning creativity and I’m not sure if I got an “A” but something serendipitous happened.

A seed of confidence or self-awareness or both was watered and the same nurturing occurred when Cliff assigned the class another writing job.

Instead of several pages of a lost boy’s meanderings, I brought in a Laugh Box, a weird plastic contraption that, when you pushed a button, emitted hideous mechanical laughter.

It worked. My classmates broke up. I got the impression Cliff thought it was odd but he didn’t flunk me, and I’ve never forgotten that sense of self-acceptance settling in which morphed into my PhD.

Cliff dedicated over 30 years to CGCC and is now in Minnesota, of all frigid places, a part of the country that makes the Catskills sound balmy, even with stupid and death-threatening February ice currently everywhere.

I didn’t know, until his latest email letter, that Cliff was a Brooklyn brat and that he devotedly served in the trenches as an ambulance EMT.

He and his wife Gloria have grandsons that live and breathe hockey so they are constant fans, providing invisible, sustaining support.

Cliff draws cool sketches and is philosophical and Gloria paints sensitively and now, thinking back, I also remember being invited to one of Cliff’s CGCC journalism classes to talk to his students about Ethics.

A tricky subject in the news business because you either have Ethics or you don’t but if you do, nobody can tell you you don’t, try as they may.

Who knew that would be enlivened, that distant day, by Cliff descending the rickety stairs to the basement, with its echoey acoustics, listening in a Shakespearean, lingering memory kind of way?