One of my old professors died this week. I knew he was sick and fading– but not that he had died until today. I haven’t seen him in years– and I am not entirely convinced that I ever said a proper thank you.
Dr. Morrisey was one of the first professors I had in college. Dr. Newhouse came first– his absurdly early Zoology class was the first college course I sat in on. I loved Dr. Newhouse– even if I spent the semester completely lost and unable to follow his lectures. Sometimes I wasn’t entirely sure if he’d been speaking in english or not.
But Dr. Morrisey I understood. And, more importantly to the very self-absorbed 18 year old Terri, he understood me. Or at least I think he did (says the still self-absorbed but older Terri). Twenty-five years ago he was a thin, quiet man. Upperclassmen on our floor whispered that they’d heard he used to be an obese man. He was so slight and so graceful that it was impossible, even on the longest class day, to mentally pad him with fat. He read beautifully. We had a good anthology that we pulled from– and he supplemented it with Tennyson and Frost.
We wrote a lot in Honors English. The usual freshman English essays– “cause & effect”, etc. Our class week had a rhythm of readings, assignment, writing, peer review, editing, deadline, grade. And then it would start up again. I grew to hate the peer review. It didn’t matter what group I fell into– the same thing happened each week. We’d bring in our written papers and pass them around or read them aloud and give feedback. The rest of the papers were haggled over– this line or that line or a word choice. Mine were met with an awkward silence. And then someone (the Campbell twins come to mind) would suggest that maybe I hadn’t understood the assignment.
It was unnerving. Handing in my first paper was a terrible feeling. I edited it but stuck mostly to my original draft which was littered with the comments from the group. When Dr. Morrisey handed our papers back the following week I was pleased to see an A.
The next paper had a similar story. Again the group felt I hadn’t understood the assignment (which was Christian College speak for “you’re an idiot and your paper is weird. We don’t like it or you.”) and again, Dr. Morrisey had given me an A. This time there was a little note added to his comments that read “You must meet my friend, Wally Metts.”
I didn’t know who Wally Metts was. (In my head he was a she because I was reading WE: the letters of Wallis Simpson and Edward, Duke of Windsor) I ignored the note and basked in the glare of one of the group girls who clearly felt like I didn’t deserve a grade twice the letters of her own.
And the semester continued that way. Every week on my paper there would be some variation to his note asking me to seek out Wally Metts. One of my papers that had an A+ with exclamation marks had a note that read he’d shared it with his friend, Wally Metts.
Eventually I did meet Wally. I spent a month up in Northern Michigan at a 19th century farmhouse writing poetry and short stories that were, apparently, some bizarre test for how much ink was in Wally’s grey pen, so riddled were they with his serial-killer jots about changing this and moving that. I didn’t see how my quiet, kind, proper Dr. Morrisey could ever be friends with Wally– Wally abhored exclamation marks. And the Oxford comma. And my persistent use of em dashes. Wally who was brutally honest in his assessment that I wasn’t nearly as talented as Dr. Morrisey had intimated…but I could be.
Wally gets all credit, in the end, for making me a better writer. For digging past all the fluffy layers to a solid core. Dr. Morrisey, though, gave me the confidence I would need to meet Wally. And to find my footing in an environment I so clumsily and often slipped my way through.
I didn’t visit Dr. Morrisey when I heard he was ill. I should have picked up a pen and written to him– and I put that off, too. He would have understood how grateful I am for those comments on my papers and for his friend Wally. I’ll pull out the old anthology tonight and dig into something that will conjure up his voice. Something with exclamation points.
commonterri 