The Professor

The Professor

In the style of Natalie Ginzburg’s “He and I”

He has taught history at the same college ever since I have known him. He loves history. He loves to teach it and hopes that his students will come to love it, too.

History, for him, encompasses past, present, and future. Knowing history is knowing ourselves.

He is energetic in the classroom. Once, I heard, he impersonated an ape.

He looks very much like a professor. He hardly ever wears jeans, especially not to class. He wears dressy cotton pants of varying neutral tones, button-up shirts, and cardigan sweaters. His favorite cardigan sweater that he wears around his house has a hole in the elbow. For special occasions he will pull a tie and dress coat out of his closet. He has a graying beard and black, thick-lensed, round-framed glasses, which make him look very academic.

He is tidy and orderly. His office is organized but crammed with bookcases, his walls with framed pictures. He keeps his lunch, usually carrots and spinach, in a mini-fridge. Yes, he sometimes eats only raw vegetables for lunch. The room smells perpetually of tea and cinnamon sugar toast.

It seems as if he knows a lot about everything. He is always reading something. As any good professor, he loves to learn. Once we watched a documentary on TV about scientists who found an ancient but well-preserved Roman ship on the bottom of the Mediterranean. We were both entranced, especially when they talked about the preserved garum, the fermented fish sauce.

He spends many hours sitting at his desk at home, grading undergraduate papers. He is a tough grader. Or so I have heard. I have never had a class with him but am told he is a very hard grader and makes you work for a good grade. I have no difficulty believing this, knowing him to be a man of high standards. He expects good work not only from students but from himself, so he gives of himself continuously. I have seen this side. He grades carefully, forms lasting relationships with students, attends conferences, and always wonders what he can do to be a better professor and Christian.

He has applied for administrative positions in the past. He would make a good administrator, I think, but he makes such a good professor, too. I’m a little glad that he didn’t get those positions because that means he is still in the classroom teaching about something he loves.

He is thoughtful, reserved, and somewhat introverted. He is comfortable in silence but will talk to you in length if you have asked a question. I remember when he drove me home during the middle of a summer camp so I could attend the funeral of a friend who had died in a four-wheeling accident. The car ride was three hours long, and I cried for many of the miles. Sometimes he talked, sometimes he didn’t, but was always the comforter. When he did speak, it was to talk about grief, God, or death or to tell a story from his own experience. He said crying was good.

He is quirky. I have seen him dance to a Lady Gaga song at his daughter’s wedding during the father/daughter dance. He couldn’t move his hips, but he tried his best. Everyone at the reception laughed. I probably won’t make him do that at my wedding.

He usually prefers older music than Lady Gaga. He likes Renaissance music and Bach. When he cleans up the kitchen after dinner, which is his contribution to the dinner process, he tunes the radio to the classical station or NPR. He likes radio shows, too, like Prairie Home Companion.

However, his entertainment tastes are quite wide for a man in his fifties. In the evening he likes to watch the popular crime shows. He likes old things—books, movies, music. He likes drama and used to act some. I found a picture once from his college days. He was dressed up in spandex and a wig as the fairy king Oberon from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I tell this to people sometimes to embarrass him.

He likes new things, too. We recently have watched Babe together, the Disney movie about the pig. Once, when I was at the very beginning of watching Beauty and the Beast, he came into the room to fetch something. I asked if he’d like to watch the movie with me. In a strained voice that let me knew he was tearing up, he told me no. He said it was about redemption and left the room. That was the first time I cried while watching the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast.

He tears up over many things—hymns at church, movies, talking about his children. I have never seen a sob, but I see his eyes water often. He is easily moved by what he loves or by where he finds grace. I tear up, too, over these sorts of things.

He has a goofy laugh. I once told him a joke that has now become his favorite. Why did the blonde get fired from the M&M’s factory?  When I tell it to him now, I can barely get past the first few words before he’s lost it in his tenor laugh. Because she threw away all the Ws.

He used to have a bad temper. I remember once he threw a large phone book across the living room, ripping it at the spine. As a young girl, I was terrified. I don’t even remember why he was angry. But he’s older now and doesn’t lose his temper very often. Sometimes he gets frustrated if the house is a mess or if the dog is annoying.

But he loves the dog, too. He talks to the dog in a voice people often use to talk to babies. He always let me get whatever pet I wanted if I was willing to care for it diligently. So I’ve had a rabbit, parakeets, hamsters, and mice. He used to grumble about the number of animals in the house because he let my siblings get their own little pets, too. Add the four young children, and you’ve practically got a zoo.

He mows the lawn every Saturday morning during the summer, wearing shorts that come just above the knee and t-shirts two sizes too large that hang on him like tents and socks that come half way up his calves and ear plugs and a large-brimmed hunter green safari hat. If I need to go outside and ask him a question I have to wave my arms and yell or practically walk right in front of his path. He’ll stop the mower, yank out the ear plugs, and look annoyed that I’ve interrupted his ritual. I guess most of those questions could wait.

He walks the seven blocks to work at the college most mornings. He wakes up at odd hours in the morning because of the insomnia and sits at the kitchen table reading a book and eating his favorite snack, tea and peanut butter toast. Then he might go back to sleep for an hour.

He wakes up very easily and usually is very surprised at first, asking with a start who is there. When I was younger and if I became scared in the night and wanted to go into my parents’ room, I made it my quest to sneak into their room without waking him. I succeeded a few times and slept on the floor by my mother’s side.

He used to play a game with his children when they were very young called bonker. It was a made up game. Whenever we ran out of a roll of paper towels, he would take the cardboard tube and sneak around the house bonking us on the head. We would run away squealing only to get surprised again with a thunk. We used to have tickle fights, too.

Sometimes when he and mommy used to argue and fight, my older sister and I would go up to the attic and cry because we thought surely our parents were getting a divorce. They don’t fight very much anymore. He doesn’t lose his temper as easily, and she is more accepting of everything. Now they have been married over thirty years, and I don’t worry about a divorce. There was never, in fact, a need to worry about divorce.

I can’t remember an argument between us. Perhaps it is because I have too much respect for him to argue with him. Perhaps it is because I never disagree with him. I have found him annoying on occasion, but I don’t even remember the reasons.

I hope he is proud of me; I think he is. He has told me before that he is proud.

He does things like study virtue and vice. I bought him once a collection of daily readings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He uses it often. This year for Christmas I got him a hand-crocheted set of Star Trek dolls. These days I like to get him sentimental things.

Sometimes I look back on my childhood and wonder where my father was at all my middle school basketball games and my high school track meets. He wasn’t there cheering me on. He was working. Sometimes I look back on my desire for “daddy pal time” and wonder if was deeper than just a call to hang out with dad. He spent many hours in his study, grading papers, or at the office. But he says he is proud of me. Teaching takes much time.

I think about the dance lessons, the music lessons, the horseback riding lessons, the art lessons, the big house where I had my own room, the well-stocked pantry, my many pets, my good grades, my independence, and I know that it’s okay that he only ever saw me compete at a track meet but once or twice.

He is a professor. A good professor, caring, thoughtful, deliberate. But he is my father, caring, thoughtful, deliberate, goofy, sentimental, loving. He will always be both, but he will first be my “Dado.”