Living Messengers

Throughout college and for many years afterward, I would often pay a visit to see my college roommate in Narberth. She’d take me to the swanky bars, and we’d spend some time with her parents.

I enjoyed being around her parents. I am and have always been an old soul, and I have never found spending time with older people a “necessary evil,” a burden or an inconvenience. Their lack of pretension, their experiences and their eccentricities have always resonated with me deeply.

Joanne and I recently met up in Philadelphia for lunch, and she suggested we take the short drive to her childhood home so that I could take one last look around. With her father (Jesse) passed and her mother (Barb) living near her sister in Florida, the house had been sold, and Joanne had taken on the Herculean task of clearing it out for the new owners. I jumped at the chance to walk through this house that had meant so much to me as a young college student.

As Joanne said, “my father saved everything.” Indeed. As we toured the house, room to room, from basement to attic, I could see she was not exaggerating. Boxes of books, receipts, papers, trinkets, and memorabilia glutted out of each room.

Jesse was a Renaissance Man, and resembled a more-distinguished version of Stan Laurel. He loved words, and music, and research, and pretty much anything that had to do with education and intellectualism. He had a dry wit, like trying to laugh through a mouthful of sawdust. It’s hard to say now, looking back, but I’m pretty sure I had a crush on him. I probably had a crush on every single one of my friends’ fathers, you know how I love older men.

Barb was Jesse’s Laurel to his Laurel. Soul mates, they resembled each other, “completed” each other. I can’t think of one without the other. I remember waking up in the morning, plodding down those (even now) creaky stairs, and hearing their soft dove voices in the kitchen. I loved standing in the kitchen while they made breakfast, and just soaking up their sawdust comedy routine. Joanne would make eggs and roll her eyes at the jokes she had heard a zillion times, lovingly correcting them when they would say something embarrassing.

But Jesse and Barb were never really embarrassing.

Jesse had hundreds of books, and Joanne had set aside a box for me. Books that she thought he would want me to have, on subjects we had in common. Word books, poetry books, empty journals for ruminations. The book I am most honored to have is a thin steno professional reporter’s notebook he had labeled “New Words.”

It sits near me now, filled with his handwriting, and contains words that even now, as an English professor and writer, I am not familiar with. Words like “taw,” and “rota,” and “demulcent.” His rigid, stoic printing style is familiar, and his presence jumps off each page. I send Joanne a picture of a page every now and then, when I decide to use a word in my writing. She loves seeing his handwriting too.

Words are thoughts, and an invincible power which will objectify themselves in the form they are given. To wit:

Words become mental places that will live forever; or they may become shacks which the first breeze may carry away. They may delight the eye as well as the ear; they may contain all knowledge; in them we find the history of the past as well as the hope of the future; they are living messengers from which every human and superhuman activity is born.