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The Day I Got Some Bad News.
By briantologist | February 11, 2010
I got an e-mail from a former professor I’m fond of today with the subject line, “Memories of Jim,” Jim being another former professor I always liked. I was horrified; I assumed Jim had died suddenly.
Well, not suddenly, it turns out, but soon enough, unfortunately. Jim was, I guess, planning to retire soon anyway, and then found out he has inoperable cancer.
The news hit me really hard. While I wouldn’t say he and I were particularly close, he was a really important person to me as a student, and not just because he was the English department chair. I’d been a pretty crap student across the board ever since roughly the 8th grade, and by the time I wised up and changed my major to English I was near the end of the fourth of what was to be a six-year undergraduate hoo-hah. I’d taken every possible non-major course I could, especially considering that my former major turned into a minor once I switched majors the fourth (and final) time. This meant that, for my last five semesters of college, literally every single class I took was an English lit class. My emphasis was modern American literature, which was Jim’s area, so he taught the majority of my courses.
I started into lit taking the same approach I’d taken to most of my earlier studies, which is to say I half-assed things to a disappointing degree. At that point I think I was expecting B’s or B-minuses in return for this lack of effort, which is a broader reflection of how I thought the world worked at the time. Yet for some reason my papers in Jim’s classes kept coming back with grades starting with C on them. After several of these bouts of honest grading, I started to get resentful, and eventually got determined: I would learn how to get A’s from Jim The Hard Grader.
This did not happen quickly, but eventually it did happen, and by the time I got there I’d become the kind of student who actually kind of deserves good grades. This was not a Rudy moment, when it finally happened. There was no charging into a packed football stadium with 20,000 English majors chanting “Bri-AN! Bri-AN! Bri-AN!” There was no running of stadium steps. There was no Charles S. Dutton. But there was a tremendous and lasting sense of satisfaction, the kind that comes with applying yourself to something you secretly suspect you can be really good at, the kind I sometimes think people rarely get, or at least the kind I certainly don’t get that often. I had made myself into a good student, and I had Jim to thank for that.
I still can’t believe he’s dying. I really did think he’d be shuffling around wearing seersucker and drinking Wild Turkey for a very long time, and learning that this will not be the case is, I guess, yet another reminder of how good life is at delivering things that do not match your expectations. It stinks, is what it does. There’s shit any of us can do about it, and it stinks. And I guess that’s all.
Topics: Laments, NaBloPoMo | 3 Comments »
February 14th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
I hate this so much. I can’t stop thinking about it since you emailed.
February 16th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Cancer sure fucking sucks. I’m really sorry to hear it, B.
February 25th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Jim was my adviser for my master’s thesis. He meant a lot to me. When Grandpa was dying, he handed me T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontian” and told me watching a great man lose his abilities is the hardest thing in the world–much harder than his death.
I hope on the last day of his last Faulkner lecture in May, he reads the last lines of “Absalom, Absalom” (“I don’t hate the south, I don’t hate the south”) and quietly slumps in his chair, scotch in a coffee thermos still sitting by his left hand.