Several weeks later and I still find myself deeply affected by the loss of my colleague Deb Kaplan in my life here at the UW. (This loss follows so quickly also on the departure of another frolleague, David Silver - two good people gone from my daily life.) Anyway, I've been toying with whether to add this - it's how I felt about Deb and what I said about Deb at the very special memorial gathering we had for her here in the Department last week. It was also such a privilege to see Deb's brother Gordon again and to meet Galia and Antoine. Anyway, here's my two penny's worth...
Along with Kathy Gill, Deb and I joined the Department of Communication at the same time – just over three years ago. On the surface of it, two more different people you couldn’t find. And yet the more time we spent together the more we kept discovering we had in common. Ultimatetly, both of us, I think, found ourselves cultural outsiders in this large all-American research university – albeit for difference reasons.
Universities are strange places: to the outsider they seem like such vibrant social, embracing places and for the most part they are – certainly for undergrads. The life of the professor, however, is surprisingly and disconcertingly antisocial. Burrowed away in our offices, beavering away at our papers, bouncing from classroom to classroom. There’s seldom much time and space for the kind of intellectual musings and conversational idlings which outsiders assume make up our working lives. It’s why I came to really value the fact that Deb and I managed to become frolleagues – both friends and a colleagues.
We’d get together from time to time for a meal after work – which typically ended up as an exchange of vices: Deb trying to keep up with my glasses of wine and me bumming cigarettes off her. During these informal meetings of “Cultural Outsiders Anonymous” we’d spend most of the meal trying to work out what the hell was going on around us, wondering if were we getting it right, if we thought our colleagues and students thought we were odd – and did we really care anyway. These were our little gatherings of the paranoid mind and we’d joke about which of us was the more overly concerned, the more debilitating sensitive! (For all sorts of reasons, I think we usually ended up agreeing that it was Deb!)
The last time we got together – about four weeks ago now – the tone of our gathering was really different. I seemed as if, after three years, Deb was beginning to feel like she was getting somewhere with the whole academic thing – working out her niche, her style, her variation on the theme of professor. I think, part of this, was because she’d simply begun to hear enough voices – and not just my own – telling her that she was lovely, that she was smart, that she was inspiring.
And part of what made Deb so inspiring to us was precisely the fact that she would never believe us anyway. Deb was a truly modest – too modest perhaps – person. And this is what was clearly keeping her such a kind, committed scholar. Deb made me think – I mean think really hard – about things. If she were here today she’d definitely be making me think about the fact that the trivial inconvenience of my journey to work in this miserable weather bears little comparison to the biting misery of being homeless again tonight.
It’s not just that we will miss Deb – we needed Deb.
Along with Kathy Gill, Deb and I joined the Department of Communication at the same time – just over three years ago. On the surface of it, two more different people you couldn’t find. And yet the more time we spent together the more we kept discovering we had in common. Ultimatetly, both of us, I think, found ourselves cultural outsiders in this large all-American research university – albeit for difference reasons.
Universities are strange places: to the outsider they seem like such vibrant social, embracing places and for the most part they are – certainly for undergrads. The life of the professor, however, is surprisingly and disconcertingly antisocial. Burrowed away in our offices, beavering away at our papers, bouncing from classroom to classroom. There’s seldom much time and space for the kind of intellectual musings and conversational idlings which outsiders assume make up our working lives. It’s why I came to really value the fact that Deb and I managed to become frolleagues – both friends and a colleagues.
We’d get together from time to time for a meal after work – which typically ended up as an exchange of vices: Deb trying to keep up with my glasses of wine and me bumming cigarettes off her. During these informal meetings of “Cultural Outsiders Anonymous” we’d spend most of the meal trying to work out what the hell was going on around us, wondering if were we getting it right, if we thought our colleagues and students thought we were odd – and did we really care anyway. These were our little gatherings of the paranoid mind and we’d joke about which of us was the more overly concerned, the more debilitating sensitive! (For all sorts of reasons, I think we usually ended up agreeing that it was Deb!)
The last time we got together – about four weeks ago now – the tone of our gathering was really different. I seemed as if, after three years, Deb was beginning to feel like she was getting somewhere with the whole academic thing – working out her niche, her style, her variation on the theme of professor. I think, part of this, was because she’d simply begun to hear enough voices – and not just my own – telling her that she was lovely, that she was smart, that she was inspiring.
And part of what made Deb so inspiring to us was precisely the fact that she would never believe us anyway. Deb was a truly modest – too modest perhaps – person. And this is what was clearly keeping her such a kind, committed scholar. Deb made me think – I mean think really hard – about things. If she were here today she’d definitely be making me think about the fact that the trivial inconvenience of my journey to work in this miserable weather bears little comparison to the biting misery of being homeless again tonight.
It’s not just that we will miss Deb – we needed Deb.
posted by iNeedle at 04:59
1 comments
