5 a.m. Friday. Having just finished washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, I sat down at the dining room table, picked up the Winter issue of the Berea College Magazine, and started leafing through it for the last time since I had promised to pass it on to a friend once I had finished. The section that caught my eye this time was the last section, Passages, Faculty and Staff, where I began reading about people I had known and worked with, always with the unspoken sense that life was a kind of race where I was leading in regard to old friends and acquaintances. Of course, when such a thought becomes conscious, I immediately feel ashamed for thinking such a thing, that they were dead and I was not, and probably would never be so careless as to end up in such a list.
But there was Dr. Bobby Fong. That name put somewhat of a check to my whimsical musings. Bobby and I lived next to one another in the English Department on the third floor of Draper for a few years. There was one of those dark narrow hallways with a huge metal fire door to close in case of dire events, then Bill Schafer's office on the left, turn the corner and my office was at the end of the dark hallway, turn around and Bobby's office was the last one in the group. Or the middle one in the group, however one chooses to count them. This group of offices, before Draper was remodeled a few years ago, always reminded me of servants' quarters in an old eighteenth-century estate.
Bobby corrupted me, I am sorry to say. He read comic books. He collected The Avengers! We went to popular culture conferences together and even to comic shops. He left Berea and became two college presidents, well, he did, Butler, as well as Ursinus. He came to my house and I went to his. We were not exactly friends, but while he and his family were in Berea, we became very good acquaintances. I started reading and collecting comic books again. Alas! I had no discipline. Where he stuck to one comic, I got 15 or 20, until I was so overwhelmed with issues that I had to quit completely, cold turkey vultures, as I now say.
I saw him at a conference in later years, but beyond that kind of meeting, we did not write or talk. In a college community, people come and go. It's the way of life. Every once in a while a former colleague becomes a good friend, a former student the same. Not too often. Now Bobby is dead. Oh, so is Bill Schafer. Two out of three. I'm winning.
Another name on the page is Christopher Pierce. If I remember correctly, he and I came to Berea in the same year, 1967. Turn the page and the lists of students begin: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, etc. I move to the 60s to see if there are any names I remember. Blessedly, there are not too many names and none I remembered, but as I turned that last page, suddenly I got a chill, for I saw myself as someone else, sitting at a table, reading my name in the Passages, and I knew--no mental tricks to avoid facing it--that my name would be there, with me dead and buried in the Berea Cemetary. It was like looking at my name through someone else's eyes without me being there, gone, and I was chilled. I was dead.