I was perusing the New York Times yesterday afternoon, as is my habit, and saw Jerry Feldman's obituary, and felt for a moment as if all the air had been sucked out of my office. I barely knew the man but he was, back in the late '60s, my father's adviser and mentor at Berkeley. But then my father reluctantly left his graduate work to go off and be in the Navy for a few years and, afterwards, found it impossible to make the transition from boot camp and aircraft carriers and Guantanamo Bay back to the insulated ivory tower of academia. He fled California with my mom and hunkered down at the lake cabin in Idaho for a year, a year that would give rise to many of my favorite childhood stories -- the flooding lake and ensuing evacuation up to the Snyders' cabin, the car that had driven off the road into the lake, the mom-made crocheted potholders sold in the local grocery store, the idea of Dad doing construction work when he wasn't being all academic, Sue McBoyle's flaming marshmallow that nearly set him afire.
Jerry Feldman encouraged Dad to return to school, to move to Germany with the family in tow for a year's worth of research that would complete his dissertation and culminate, finally in a PhD from Berkeley and a tenured professorship at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
For some inexplicable or at least unknown reason, years ago, decades ago now, Dad moved a box to his Barnard office, up on the 4th floor of Lehman Hall. A cardboard box, plain white, unmarked. Somehow, after his death way back in 1993, this plain, unmarked cardboard box stayed in the office despite there being a new inhabitant. Professor Sloan very kindly stored this box the entire time I was at Barnard, but then finally, and ever so gently, suggested that perhaps I take it off his hands before I graduated.
My buddy Allison and I lugged the thing back to my dorm where I spent the next several days frustratingly mesmerized. Full to the brim with papers and notes, exams, syllabi and notebooks, almost everything handwritten indecipherable to me. (Word had it that a student once was busted at the Barnard Registrar's office for forging Professor McNeil's signature on something -- all because the registrar could read it.)
This box has been with me ever since, from dorm to dorm, from Morningside Heights to the Upper West Side to Philadelphia to Brooklyn, briefly to Queens, eventually to Washington Heights, where it has slowly, these past eight years, migrated north along Fort Washington Avenue to its current resting place at the back of my pantry closet. It is now oddly collapsed, concave rather than flat on top, roughly in the shape of a large cat. Nova has been fond of this box ever since I brought her home from the ASPCA back in March of 2000. She likes the places where it dwells: in the backs of closets, under beds, hidden away in the dark, protected from wandering hands and feet and loud noises and unwelcome guests.
Somewhere in the midst of all the indecipherable papers in this box, there is a typed letter. I have not read this letter since graduating from Barnard, but it was, to me, a beautiful and moving letter. It was the letter that my father wrote to the history department at Berkeley asking to be able to continue his work there. It was a letter that expressed his disappointment in a world capable of inflicting such damage as the Vietnam War, a letter that expressed his fears that he should not go into teaching, that he had no wisdom or understanding or knowledge to impart to anyone. In the end, it was a letter explaining that his time away from academia, in Idaho with my mother, had given him new balance, new confidence, and that he was ready. Ready to return to Berkeley, ready to pursue his research, ready to inhabit, again, a role in the lives of those around him.
Other than my mother, it was Jerry Feldman who most encouraged and influenced my father in his search for new-found peace and confidence, and who continued to offer encouragement and friendship throughout his academic career.
Jerry Feldman encouraged Dad to return to school, to move to Germany with the family in tow for a year's worth of research that would complete his dissertation and culminate, finally in a PhD from Berkeley and a tenured professorship at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
For some inexplicable or at least unknown reason, years ago, decades ago now, Dad moved a box to his Barnard office, up on the 4th floor of Lehman Hall. A cardboard box, plain white, unmarked. Somehow, after his death way back in 1993, this plain, unmarked cardboard box stayed in the office despite there being a new inhabitant. Professor Sloan very kindly stored this box the entire time I was at Barnard, but then finally, and ever so gently, suggested that perhaps I take it off his hands before I graduated.
My buddy Allison and I lugged the thing back to my dorm where I spent the next several days frustratingly mesmerized. Full to the brim with papers and notes, exams, syllabi and notebooks, almost everything handwritten indecipherable to me. (Word had it that a student once was busted at the Barnard Registrar's office for forging Professor McNeil's signature on something -- all because the registrar could read it.)
This box has been with me ever since, from dorm to dorm, from Morningside Heights to the Upper West Side to Philadelphia to Brooklyn, briefly to Queens, eventually to Washington Heights, where it has slowly, these past eight years, migrated north along Fort Washington Avenue to its current resting place at the back of my pantry closet. It is now oddly collapsed, concave rather than flat on top, roughly in the shape of a large cat. Nova has been fond of this box ever since I brought her home from the ASPCA back in March of 2000. She likes the places where it dwells: in the backs of closets, under beds, hidden away in the dark, protected from wandering hands and feet and loud noises and unwelcome guests.
Somewhere in the midst of all the indecipherable papers in this box, there is a typed letter. I have not read this letter since graduating from Barnard, but it was, to me, a beautiful and moving letter. It was the letter that my father wrote to the history department at Berkeley asking to be able to continue his work there. It was a letter that expressed his disappointment in a world capable of inflicting such damage as the Vietnam War, a letter that expressed his fears that he should not go into teaching, that he had no wisdom or understanding or knowledge to impart to anyone. In the end, it was a letter explaining that his time away from academia, in Idaho with my mother, had given him new balance, new confidence, and that he was ready. Ready to return to Berkeley, ready to pursue his research, ready to inhabit, again, a role in the lives of those around him.
Other than my mother, it was Jerry Feldman who most encouraged and influenced my father in his search for new-found peace and confidence, and who continued to offer encouragement and friendship throughout his academic career.
1 comment:
Emily, cousin Eric here again. Thanks for the rememberance about your dad. I think it would be interesting to see that letter - seems from your description that it could describe the arc of many lives (or maybe just mine) - idealism to cynicism to something else that gets one through life.
Y'know you are one of my favorite bloggers. I have you tagged on Google Reader, so everytime you post something I take a look. I have many blogs that I read, a lot related to professional type things, but if you have written something it jumps to the top of the list. Thanks.
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