Comings and Goings
When I saw the online mention of the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, it brought to mind my days as a student at East Carolina University. One of my teachers was an advocate of Transcendental Meditation. He was in the economics department, was a calm person who drove a Corvette, and lobbed slow-pitch questions on multiple-choice exams. For instance, we once had to decide whether Congress actually repealed the “law” of supply and demand, or if another suggested choice applied.
I never really thought of the instructors as “professors” in the same light I would later consider my mentors at seminary, but some memorable ones popped up along the way. On the disappointing side was my academic advisor in the business school, whose name I no longer recall. That’s fair, though, because I had the distinct impression he neither remembered my name nor any prior conversations whenever I stopped by his office for another confusing interaction. Some of us suspected that the head of the accounting department spent her evenings in pursuit of liquid courage, but then, perhaps she was weary, coming to the end of the line, unfortunate enough not to escape the campus scene prior to the upheaval and dismantling of everything sacred.
Some of my teachers at ECU had distracting idiosyncrasies. Of course, in those days at a Tobacco Road school, several of them smoked in class, as did numerous students. My philosophy instructor, in a deadeningly tortuous 3:00 p.m. class in the Spring quarter, no less, forced us to spend the weeks pondering the question, “What is temperance?”
He personally didn’t display temperance in his fumbling with cigarettes and matches, and perhaps it was supposed to be an object lesson. While we carefully tracked the number of times he articulated the word, “uh,” he lit his cigarette, inhaling thoughtfully as the match flamed longer than necessary. Then he blew out the match, slowly shook it eight or ten times, blew on it some more, shook it again, all the while lost in philosophical rumination, before finally dropping the match on the floor and grinding it into total submission with his cowboy-booted foot.
While fragrant spring flowers and bushes gracefully blossomed outside the classroom window attracting rejoicing bees, and every beautiful, great-to-be-young Friday afternoon seemed horribly wasted, I can report there were no fires in the building.
Another teacher spent the class time pensively rolling his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, rolling them back down, and then up again. My tax accounting teacher advised that we apportion the yellow smudges from our highlighters on the few unimportant sections in the tax code book we used as our text, rather than follow the more traditional reverse practice. It was a true lesson in minimizing expenses, the inspirational slogan of the business school.
A tragic case ensued concerning my freshman English teacher, Russell Christman. It also was his first year at ECU and in North Carolina. He was from Philadelphia, and he and I hit it off from the beginning. He was appropriately impressed by my polished skills in the “funnel technique” of composition. It was relentlessly pounded into me in high school honors English classes, and I had it covered: write an introduction describing what you were going to say, make your points that say it, conclude by summarizing what you said. Simple, straightforward, satisfying. I remember writing for him one paper in particular that he held up as an example to the class. It was a treatise from an 18 year-old mind on ethno-centric interpretation of human events. He loved it.
A couple of years later, Russ went to Raleigh with some others to attend an event at N.C. State University. Along the way, the car was involved in an accident. While others were triaged at the scene and some were transported to the hospital, Russ refused to go, even to be examined. He felt fine. Within hours, Russ collapsed and died.
Life, however, went on, albeit with an ugly hole rudely punched into the fabric.
