I read this remembrance of my friend Bill at his memorial service, St. Mark's Cathedral, July 21, 2012.
I met Bill in a way that will be
instantly recognizable to all of you who know Bill as an adventurer of the
mind. Bill showed up in an
upper-division Romantic poetry course that I was teaching at the University of
Washington in 1996 and proceeded to entrance everyone with his enthusiasm for
George Gordon, Lord Byron. When we got
to that part of the syllabus, I’d arrive in class, get everyone started, and
then hand it over to Bill, who would stand up and declaim the day’s Byron
reading to a classroom full of rapt teens and twenty-somethings. It took me about an hour after meeting him to
realize that Bill was the truest enthusiast of the imagination that I would
ever know.
I
think one of the clearest signs of that enthusiasm was Bill’s utter
authenticity. He strove to uncover and
understand the heart of everything he truly loved. It wasn’t enough for him to just read
Byron. Bill wanted to walk where Byron
walked, striving with every step to understand the workings of the poet’s
mind. Bill actually attended conferences
all over the world where he delivered his own papers about Byron. That is the act of a true enthusiast, and
what’s amazing is that Bill extended the very same enthusiasm to his pursuit of
vintage Mustangs, single-malt scotch, wooden canoes, cross-country skiing, the
weather, and, most of all, the hundreds of people in his immediate and extended
circles.
I
think Bill loved people–all kinds of people–more than he loved anything else
beyond his family. I was constantly
amazed by how instantaneously Bill could make a true friend. Everyone and everything interested him. When a friend old or new would mention a new
pursuit to him, his eyes would just light up and he’d lean forward and demand
to know every last detail. And then he
would remember them
Because Bill truly
knew how to pay attention. He missed
nothing, particularly when it came to his natural surroundings and the people
that he loved. John Hanron describes
the way Bill saw the “incredible, infinite beauty within each tiny flower” that
John brought with him on his visits. All
of us know how closely Bill listened to us, how he shared our joys and
sorrows. “I don’t know exactly what a
prayer is,” Mary Oliver writes in her poem “The Summer Day.” “I do know how to pay attention, how to fall
down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and
blessed. ... Tell me, what else should I have done? ... Tell me, what is it you
plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Bill
chose to live his wild and precious life in exploration and learning, in the
company of friends and nature, in the meadows of the Methow, on the trails of
the Pacific Northwest, in the streets of Paris, on the isle of Skye. He loved, he explored, he never stopped
learning. He followed the vein of his
wild and precious life into its very heart.
I
close with the conclusion of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Bill’s poem if ever
there was one.
The
spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too
am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back
for me,
It flings my likeness after the
rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the
dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white
locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and
drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to
grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me
under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or
what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you
nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep
encouraged,
Missing me one place search
another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
