My Oldest Best Friend, Dick Ford

Even as a child, I knew that the superlative expression “best friend” was not really a unique category.  Within a few years of meeting Dick, I met other friends who could be characterized as “my best friend.”  I’m sure that Dick learned the same thing, and that there are some, even in the spheres of academia and art, who have been better friends than I. But Dick Ford was the first person to exemplify that category for me, the first and oldest best friend of childhood. 

"Detail of Michelangelo's Pieta" by Dick Ford
Photo by Charles M. Gatlin, Jr.

When we reconnected in 2005, owing to my sister Susan’s diligence in searching the internet, Dick reminded me that we met even before starting school:  “I recall the moment of our meeting on Slade when you walked across the street and introduced yourself a few days before the start of first grade.” He told me he was amazed that I was allowed to cross the street by myself: he was forbidden with the threat of dire punishment if he got into the street.  What he didn’t know was that was the first time I had been allowed to do so, and my mother was watching the whole operation to make sure I looked both ways, etc., as she had instructed me.

That was the beginning of a close friendship, not just for Dick and me, but for both our families. Since our dads both worked for Convair/General Dynamics, and had backgrounds coming from Mississippi, this whole thing may have been orchestrated by our parents. But from our perspective, it felt like the friendship of Dickie and Chuck led to the Fords’ friendship with the Gatlins. (In my mind, he was “Dickie Ford” long after he had dropped the diminutive form of his name.)  I can remember the families on sitting on folding chairs outside, over at our house, waiting for an eclipse of the moon--Dick and I were always interested in astronomy. Lots of weekends at Lake Benbrook, where our fathers ran trotlines, or waterskied. Some years we were in the same class a school, sometimes not.

This friendship lasted through the Gatlins moving from Fort Worth out to Springtown,  During one of Dick’s visits to Springtown, he carved a wooden version of “Sting” from THE HOBBIT. We used a piece of 1×2 pine board to carve out Bilbo’s sword and (for me) Gandalf’s sword, both of which Dick then took home to Fort Worth to finish. I had some glow-in-the-dark paint that he applied, along with other paint and varnish and plastic gems. 

When the Ford family moved to Florida, Dick left “Sting” with me, as well as his set of dinosaurs that we had spent many hours playing with, constructing antediluvian and underground civilizations. We exchanged a lot of letters in those days before anyone dreamt of email or the Internet.

Sometime late in our college years--about 1974 or ‘75--Dick was passing through \the DFW area, and he spent the night at our apartment one evening, but after dropping him off at the airport to continue his journey, we somehow lost contact for about thirty years.  In those intervening years, Dick married, had a son, and lost his wife to illness.  Then, not long after our mother passed away, my sister Susan put us back in communication. 

In some ways it felt like we’d never been out of contact.  In 2007 we had our first visit in person, in the old neighborhood where Susan still lives, where I gave Dick the wooden carved sword he made. Shortly after that trip, he wrote

            “Adam has been interested in the Sting sword since we got back. He's not used to seeing things I made that look so rustic, but he seems to like the idea that I did it when I was a teenager. I don't have Tolkien runes in my head any more, so I can't read the inscriptions without the key in the books.  Alas, minds fade...

            The time we visited was too short; let's try to make a way to have a lengthier chat next time.”

Dick managed to visit a couple more times, with Adam in tow, to my dad’s place in Mississippi during summertime, and we had those lengthier chats.  He visited once after Adam’s death, and I visited him in Mize a few years after that. In between, we kept in contact over Facebook, e-mail, and Messenger.  He kept me apprised as he began to have more frequent health problems, and in April 2019 communicated that he very likely had little time left. But he rallied, surviving more than a year more, with the help of family and friends and visiting health care people. 

That last week of his life, he posted scans of a spurt of art-making, and I commented on one piece in particular, getting a short response back. A few days later, the news came that he was gone.

There are so many memories and stories that could be told! But I’d like to close with this.

In the first email I sent Dick after we reconnected in 2005, I commented that I really liked the way he closed his message--and, indeed, it was how he closed most of the messages we exchanged for the next fifteen years:  “Be kind. Be of good cheer.”  In his reply to my comment, he repeated the words again, adding “[they are like asymptotes; approachable, but not reachable]”

We can take comfort today, on what would have been his 67th birthday, that although we have suffered a great loss, Dick has gone on to be reunited with those he loved, especially his son Adam, in a place where the words “Be kind. Be of good cheer” are no longer asymptotes, but an experience of eternity and blessedness.

Providential Fogginess on Pentecost Sunday

So now on Sundays, our parish is continuing to live-stream the services, as we have been since mid-Lent; but we have re-instituted in-person, socially distanced, mask-wearing services. For music, we're continuing to have a cantor (yours truly) for the psalm and the alleluia verse, and four or so choir members (sitting far apart in our loft at the back of the church) singing along on hymns and service music, to assist the service. Next week, Trinity Sunday, has traditionally been the last service "with choir" for the summer, with the choristers taking a break until the bishop's visitation near Labor Day. Some years, like last year, the choir sings a few times throughout the summer, without vesting.
I've been trying to wear a mask while singing the hymns, although I have to take it off for cantoring. (Again, the loft is high up and I'm standing back by the organ, well over 10 feet back from the balcony rail/edge of the loft, so I'm pretty confident this is safe for the folks down below.) A side effect of wearing the mask is that my glasses fog up, at least for most of the service.
In chanting the Alleluia verse, I looked at the very familiar music, and what came out of my mouth was some other tone entirely. I don't know exactly what it was I did, but at least I didn't stop in the middle but went on, ending in a different cadence but not a different key. The second half of the verse was completed as written. I'd like to blame the fogginess for that, but it was mind-fogginess, I suppose, not foggy lenses.

After the offertory organ music in lieu of anthem, today being Pentecost, the offertory hymn was No. 506, "Praise the Spirit in creation" (words by Michael Hewless, tune Finnian by Christopher Dearnley. This will be familiar to Episcopalians and other Anglicans from its inclusion in The Hymnal 1982. We were supposed to sing vv. 1–2, 5–6. That was printed in the bulletin, at the top of the hymn, just after the title. Somehow I missed that entirely, and the organist forgot, also, because she played not four verses, but five. She and the congregation finished, and I started the first word of the sixth verse, "Praise," but immediately shut up when I realized no one else was singing. MAYBE the lenses were foggy when I stood up to sing, but I think really it was that I just overlooked the instructions. If this had been our choir as normal, one or two people would have reminded each other about the omission of verses, and I'd have noticed it. But we were safely spread out, socially distanced. Luckily, it isn't apparent, exactly, on the recording—I listened and couldn't tell, exactly, which verses were sung. I suspect it was a mix downstairs as well as upstairs. My one-word solo is mercifully inaudible on the YouTube recording of the live-stream, so maybe only those of us upstairs heard it.

However, I used the word "Providential" in the title of this post. That's because I was unfamiliar with verses 3 and 4 of this hymn, and as I was singing them, I thought that they were a good example of modern hymn writing, with straightforward language, direct and timeless like the best of the old hymns, clearly praising and displaying the work of the Holy Spirit in our world, and reminding us of the miracle of Pentecost, the coming of the wind of heaven as well as flame on that little band of people:

"Praise the Spirit, who enlightened priest and prophets with the word; his the truth behind the wisdoms which as yet know not our Lord; By whose love and power, in Jesus God himself was seen and heard.

Tell of how theˆascended Jesus armed a people for his own; how a hundred men and women turned the known world upside down, to its dark and furthest corners by the wind of heaven blown."
So my mistake was a happy one for me, something gone a little astray that enabled a little blessing. A little comfort in a troubled time.

FIFTY YEARS AGO: THE MOON LANDING

[NOTE: Ten years ago I made a blog post about the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing, which I include below with some ages/numbers updated.  Back then, I had responses to this posting from the following current Facebook Boyd Gatlin, Elizabeth Moon, and Nan Strohminger.] 

    Fifty years ago, in July of 1969, my parents were 39 years old—twenty-seven years younger than I am today. I was sixteen, my sisters were thirteen and eleven, and my maternal grandmother was 66 (my age now). The six of us were on vacation, riding in a Rambler station wagon and pulling a small travel trailer. As Apollo 11 made its descent, we were in Arkansas, driving up into the Ozarks, on our way to Devil's Den State Park. My father had the radio tuned to a broadcast from Mission Control in Houston. From time to time, the station would fade out and one of my parents would retune the car radio to pick up a closer, stronger station. I don't think we three kids ever kept quieter in the car than that afternoon. We were in the mountains, on a narrow, twisty road of the kind that always made my mother nervous (me too!) when we heard the words "The Eagle has landed."

   Sometime later we got to the campground, and set up early for the night. Ahead of time, my parents had located a state campground that had electrical hookups, because for the first time ever, we had brought a television with us on a camping trip. There was no way we were going to miss the broadcast of the first step on the moon. After we were settled in and it began to get dark, there were some anxious minutes while the tv was tuned in. I seem to recall aluminum foil on the rabbit ears antenna to augment the not-very-strong signal. I remember that I was worried that we wouldn't get to see the broadcast, that the signal would not come in. However, what I remember most was my grandmother's reaction to the historic first human step on another world. Her mother had taken her and her brother Rossman, when she was a little girl in New Orleans, to see the Wright brothers, who were touring the country with their new invention. It was amazing, she said, to think that in her own lifetime we had gone from the first flying machine to landing on the moon.

   So now it has been longer since that first moon landing than my parents lived before it. All of my sisters' children and grandchildren have been born after mankind last walked on the moon in 1972. Currently (still!) orbiting the moon is the LRO, which took the picture accompanying this post, showing the landing site of that first landing in 1969. (So much for the conspiracy theory that it was all a special effects show!)

   I'd like to say my own lifetime spanned from the first man orbiting the Earth to the first permanent occupation of the moon. Here's hoping that mankind's next visit will lead to a permanent outpost on our closest neighbor, before another century draws to a close!

Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State

First Selections for 2017 – Year of Poetry

Because so much of the social media traffic has been about how horrendous 2016 has been in terms of prominent deaths and political upsets, I thought I'd start out the first day of 2017, a Sunday, with something serious.  So I got out my copy of Cowper's poems, and started reading the Olney Hymns.  I limited myself to the first twenty-five, and of course there were two very familiar ones in that section:  "O! For a Closer Walk with God" and "There is a fountain filled with blood"—both mainstays of English hymnody.  I was a little surprised how much I found to appreciate in some of the others, since by reputation in most of my college studies they had not been very fairly characterized.  They were full of a sense of conviction of sin, but not in a judgmental or accusatory way.  They're very out of fashion, but I enjoyed them. The two most famous worked for me as poetry more than did the rest, which were more gnomic or advisory—versified discourse more than what I'd call poetry.  Very different from lyric poetry or even the Psalms; maybe "domesticated" (in the best sense) would be a better description.  I decided none of them were appropriate for posting without a much longer commentary than I felt up to providing today, so I cast my eyes about for something else.

There's a book of poems called PANAMA PATCHWORK that I've had for more than 25 years, but never really looked at much.  My copy is the 6th edition, 1920, of a collection first published around the turn of the 20th century.  James Stanley Gilbert, edited by his friend Tracy Robinson.  I found two poems appropriate to the passing of a terrible old year (De Profundis) and hope for the new year (A New Year's Rainbow). Here I offer them for your perusal:

De Profundis

                                Almighty Dispenser of good things and ill,

                                       Purveyor of foods that delight or annoy;

                                Thou that doth every man's little cup fill

                                       With draughts to be drained of sorrow or joy:

                                Disgusted we come to the Presence to-day,

                                       Sans flattering speeches of moment and pith,

                                But simply and briefly and bluntly to say

                                       That we firmly believe that Job was a myth.

                                We are weary of patience and all of that cant

                                       About love that can chasten love gasping for breath.

                                We are minus that faith that can cheerfully rant

                                       Of the blessings of life in the presence of death.

                                We do not believe in the silver that lines

                                       The horse-blanket clouds spread above us for weeks,

                                For we know all the silver is safe in the mines

                                       That is not in the pockets of somebody's breeks.

                                We are weary of funerals, weary of tears,

                                       We are weary of pushing unpushable walls;

                                We are weary of leveling mountains of fears—

                                       Of building a Hope that instantly falls.

                                We have given to Misery more than her half,

                                       We have rendered to Gloom more years than are his,

                                We have moped long enough!  Great God let us laugh

                                       Before we forget what a laugh is!

A New Year's Rainbow

                                            It rose this morning out of the sea,

                                                   Just as the sun was peeping,

                                            With glances bright at the distant night

                                                   That still in the West was sleeping.

                                            The rain that in the sombre dawn

                                                   Like tears from the clouds was falling

                                            Had passed away while the god of day

                                                   The darkness was enthralling.

                                            And it said, "Faint heart, take cheer!  Take cheer,

                                                   And behold the sign and token

                                            I bring to thee from over the sea,

                                                   Of the promise never broken!

                                            The grief I follow shall ne'er return:

                                                   Oh, list to my joyous message!

                                            Dost thou not know that my gleaming bow

                                                   Of a glad new year is presage?"

Catching Up a Few Years

It's been a long time since I posted on this blog, and I won't try to completely catch up on events.  A lot has happened.

I held a one-year faculty appointment at UNT.  After my term as "Professor Gatlin" in the Department of Technical Communications was complete, before I had time to really look around for something else, I was asked just before the Fall semester 2015 to take a couple of first-year writing classes in the Department of English as an adjunct professor.  Since this was a different curriculum and different textbooks, I agreed thinking that I'd teach the first half twice before taking classes for the second half.
Where my thinking was not clear was that in the "off" semester, there are fewer sections of the first half of first-year writing, and there was no section available for me to teach.  That was okay with me, because I really didn't think I was doing so well with the English writing curriculum, after my more satisfying experiences with the Tech Comm equivalent.

So about the time I started looking for something new (insurance coverage was drawing to a close, and COBRA looked expensive), I got a call from a highly placed executive from my former employer (see the earlier postings about getting fired for "tardiness" after 33-1/2 years).  She told me my name had come up in a meeting about a problem, as a possible solution.  She wondered if I would be interested in doing some work along the lines of my former job.

Everything came together on this fairly quickly in HR terms, and I am now employed by a contract house at my former aerospace employer.  All the unfriendly faces of the past are gone, and a few of the old friendly ones are still there, along with the new friendly faces.  They have already extended the original term for which they estimated they would need my help, so it looks like I'll continue to be employed there (well compensated) at least several months into the New Year.  Which I am going to refer to as ...

THE YEAR OF POETRY

By that term I mean that I'm going to be making a special effort to read, study, post, and maybe even compose more poetry this year.  I'll be posting about what I'm reading, or at least that's the plan.  Check by and see how it goes!

. . .And the Beginning of a New Chapter

So a few weeks ago, I was surfing the web, reading blogs and Facebook, checking out the SF markets on Ralan.com—you know the sort of thing.  I had been thinking that I probably should start looking for some sort of part-time employment to bring in a little income, rather than continuing—as they used to say—"living on my capital." So I looked at the web sites at TCU, Tarrant County College (what we used to call TCJC), and the University of North Texas, my Alma Mater for both BA (1974, under its former name, NTSU) and MA (1996). I actually applied for positions at TCC and UNT, although it was so late in the summer.  "Surely," I thought, "All the hiring has been completed for the fall semester."  To my surprise, I was contacted for interviews for both.

After an initial telephone interview with UNT, I was contacted for an in-person interview in the form of teaching a demonstration lesson from the syllabus used in the entry-level technical communications class taken mostly by science and engineering majors. A day later an offer of employment was made and accepted, and just ten days later I was in the classroom on the first day of the fall semester.

It had been sort of a dream to someday teach again somewhere like North Texas, but with the collapse of my PhD studies I had about given that up.  Now, after a sometimes exhilarating and sometimes terrifying few days, I'm not only employed but full time and on the faculty, at least for a nine-month contract.  I've made it through the first week. I've been dealing with a great group of people in the Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication. I'm looking forward to next week and the weeks to come.

The End of An Experiment . . .

Some of you already know that I have dropped out of school, withdrawing from UTA this past spring.  The reasons are complicated, but suffice it to say that I had dug myself into a hole from which I decided it was not worth expending the effort to remove myself in order to continue.  Mostly this can be attributed to my own dislike for the current emphasis on critical theory, much of which I find difficult to believe. The situation was not improved by the changing in midstream of some rules about participating in the program.

I enjoyed much my experiences at UTA, especially meeting and dealing with smart, young people and engaging professors.  With one exception, I was treated with consideration and friendliness by my fellow students and my teachers, and I remember them with fondness.  But that chapter is closed; it was an experiment that failed.  Keep watching for information about the next chapter.

Eripe me de inimicis (Psalm 59)

6.  For our Enemies
O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies:  Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

In the previous posts, I mentioned the person who fired me last March from my job of 33-1/2 years, and said that I'd probably flip him off if I saw him face to face, although I had "let go of most of the anger."  I was not ready to forgive him, not least of all because I figured he was not in the least repentant about the thing he did.  Some of the verses of Psalm 59 described the way I felt:  "For the sins of their mouths, for the words of their lips, for the cursing and lies that they utter, let them be caught in their pride.  Make an end of them in your wrath; make an end of them, and they shall be no more." Not that I wanted him to die, but I wished for him at least to feel a little bit sorry about what he did (firing me,  and even more, lying about me to keep me from collecting unemployment), even if I never learned about it.

Today I found out that he was having brain surgery, to be followed by chemotherapy.  My immediate reaction was "Damn! Now I can't even wish retribution on him any more."  My next thought was "There's the explanation for how irrational his behavior has been."  That has been followed by a few hours of feeling alternately guilty and angry that this has come up.

I wouldn't—and don't—wish physical harm, especially this sort of sickness, on anyone.  That said, I have to admit that if I had heard that he had died, I would feel, at most, mild regret that something so bad had occurred. Since instead what I heard was that he was sick, I hope he recovers fully.  But I will always wish that he hadn't connived against and lied about me.