"For George."
The limits of love.
FEBRUARY 15—It has been nearly a decade since his death and I still talk with George. I hear his laughter, see his bright eyes twinkling from beneath the bushy eyebrows for which he was famous. We visit in his welding studio where he loads two pipes with fragrant tobacco. Taking up a chair, he slaps his thigh saying, “Come here, kid! Sit on my lap.” And I do. And we talk and laugh and smoke our pipes. It is all memory now.
George was a much loved professor of art at the University of Idaho and taught me to weld. “You have a feel for metal like nobody else,” he often said to me. And he backed it up by giving me the oxy acetylene torch he’d used years earlier when a student himself. Beloved though he was, there were probably few of his students, if any besides me, who sat on his lap and shared a pipe. That was in the early ’80s. No such thing could happen now. Fearful and suspicious distance is required where once there could be trust—where deep affection of a special kind—the kind I describe—could flower.
George’s teaching career was long and he was well-liked and respected by all: administrators, colleagues, staff, students. His influence spanned decades and continues to reverberate.
Long after I’d graduated, we continued to correspond in the old-fashioned way of writing. At their cocktail hour, George took to reading my letters aloud to his wife and together they shared in my adventures and misadventures. We had lost touch when, in spring 2000, I wrote to tell George of my return to Idaho after many years away and my long convalescence following acute congestive heart failure.
George’s reply was quick to arrive and came from a man with his own broken heart. His only and much-loved son—a man my age and with a similar penchant for solitary adventures—had recently disappeared while backpacking in Texas. The worst was feared. The worst was confirmed two months later when his body was found. He had, it was assumed, unknowingly stumbled into a drug deal in the back country he was hiking through.
The College of Art and Architecture sent the grieving parents an entire case of the best single malt whisky money could buy and hosted a wake in true Irish fashion. It touched George deeply, and he wrote to me of his gratitude. I sent George a rock. It was smooth and gray, just big enough to fit comfortably in the palm of his large hand, and distinguished only in being shaped like a heart.
I cannot now recall where I found it, but the rock had been my most precious talisman. George cherished it—said it held powerful medicine—and carried it everywhere in his trouser pocket, palming it frequently. I will never know the heartbreaking sorrow of outliving a child. To his credit, George didn’t lose his sense of humor or his capacity to appreciate life. His heart was simply too big.
We again lost touch during the early years of my long struggle with ME/CFS—when I could no longer keep up with friendships, when caring for myself took all the energy I had. During that lapse George died. I learned of his passing several years after the fact and for some time it weighted the grief I felt. Now, with a much lighter heart, I feel only love and gratitude.
I am still learning from George—I hear his voice echoing through the years. He taught me how to think and work in metal—how to hear the music in my own creative process and turn it into dance. More important: He encouraged me to take those same skills and apply them to life. By example, he showed me what it meant to have an open, flexible, and fluid mind—a laughing, loving mind.
The best of teachers plant seeds. However slow mine have been to germinate, they are—I hope I am not wrong—finally flowerings and reaching for the sun.
Love: Unbounded by time and space—undiminished by death—has no limits.
I love you, George.
Very nice Cara.
Beautiful, Cara.