Posted by William Huie on April 23, 2001 at 19:38:54 from 206.1.120.2 :
Dear People, I met Ed when I was ten or eleven, when he made a summertime trip to visit his sister, my grandmother, in Plainview, Texas. The picture at the top of this page is from that trip, and he is sitting in his sister's solarium, looking out on her backyard. Ed did not return very frequently to Plainview, and he lived very far from Texas; however, he was never far from memories of the 1930s and 1940s on the staked plains. In the past few years, those memories appeared to become more and more important to him. Walking across the park near his house on Jewett, lush and green as much of Buffalo is during the summer, we would talk about the dust storms, the hard times, the ragtag unionism and communism of the Panhandle in the 1930s, his childhood yearning to escape, and the loose ends that constituted our family there. It took me many years to realize that much of what fueled Ed's thought experiments had its origins in his childhood on the high plains. The last time he visited Plainview was for his sister's funeral in 1998. He was not ready to say goodbye to her, none of us was, but I think he had laid to rest much of the conflict and ambivalence that he had always associated with that region. Ed had a voracious appetite for ideas. He also had voracious appetites for rum raisin ice cream, oreos, poetry, and protest, but I think his appetite for ideas matched or exceeded all of these. Ed lived deliberately, and he lived deliberately and unapologetically as an intellectual. His intellectualism was never obscurantist: his devotion for dialogue made him perhaps the most democratic intellectual I will ever know, and he brooked neither elitism nor stupidity. He spoke deliberately, too, a source of endless frustration for many native Northeasterners who were not accustomed to the Ed's low words-per-minute ratio. I cannot estimate the breadth and depth of Ed's influence on me. I visited Jewett Parkway almost every summer during my adolescent years, roughly 1986 through 1992. What comes to me are a flood of memories: stories and scenes that are no more than tidbits in retrospect and cannot adequately illustrate his importance in my life. The flat he rented for us in Wales during our bicycling trip there. His impromptu standard-shift lessons on the side of the highway there when he realized I would have to drive the rental car as he had not driven in ten or twelve years. Biking outside Cambridge, listening to his memories of his and Juanita's honeymoon there thirty years earlier. Eating his oregano-drenched "hash" on the red patio table under the dim, yellow porchlight. Walking Meg and talking about process theory, his thumbs hooked through his backpack straps, unwittingly exaggerrating his barrel chest. Driving, with Ed in the passenger seat, through New England speculating about the REAL reasons for the Persian Gulf war, glancing over to see that NPR and my own rambling soliloquizing had lulled him to sleep. Stopping in at the tailor to pick up new dashikis on the way to dinner at his favorite Greek restaurant. Going to find a lemonade while Ed "meditated" on the Central Park bench. But always talking, conversations that would last for weeks and continue in letters after I returned home. I very consciously breathed in life there as a series of lessons in how to live. And I unconsciously absorbed his immense joy and gentleness. As I got older, I stopped corresponding so frequently. In the past couple years, we did not really correspond or talk at all, although he did send me drafts of a couple of his poems, sometimes we had a phone call on holidays. I realize now that I foolishly felt that I had disappointed him, that I was not living up to the lessons I had learned there in Buffalo during what for me will always have been halcyon, unforgettable days. My last letter to him was a petulant complaint about the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, hardly what I would have chosen as my last words to him. I did not have a chance to talk to him about the birth of my first child. My wife and I are moving to DC from Texas this summer, and I was excited to visit Buffalo with my young family to introduce my son to his Buffalo family. (I had a feeling I would not be able to do this without tears, and I was right.) I do believe that Ed's passing underlines more than ever the imperative that we must look inside to know the self, and ceaselessly look about ourselves for the truth about the world. Yours,
I'm sure many of you are familiar with this salutation, usually written in large, looping script in black felt-tip pen or typed near the top of a package of xerox materials, sometimes numbering, when they arrived at my house, over a hundred pages. "Dear People" was Ed's greeting to his class, usually, but it might have been his greeting generally to the world, and it marked like a signpost that what followed was likely a thought, or an idea, or strand of thoughts and ideas, that were, at the least, provocative, usually novel, sometimes irritating. Now I'm trying to do what Ed spent much of his time trying to teach me, and many others, to do, and that's to write a letter. Letters for Ed were important in themselves, but he believed they also have a metaphorical significance . . .
William Huie