So cruel, and yet so beautiful

You know the quote.

"April is the cruelest month," said T.S. Eliot.

So cruel, and yet so beautiful.

I thought about it today as I drove downtown. The greens, the blues, the vivid hues. Everything feels so alive.

Those who know me well know this is my season. April and its beauty. And its butterflies. And its baseball.

Like the character in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," I am recalled to life.

And yet. And yet.

My sister died one April. So, too, did a beloved aunt and uncle. So, too, did my great-grandfather, 40 years ago. My mother was talking about it this morning.

Anyone familiar with American history knows the sadness that lies in this month. Such slaughter at Shiloh. Such an ending at Appomattox. Assassination on April 14, 1865. MLK in Memphis.

Each Easter week I think of one of my professors, Dr. Robert Drake, Southern gentleman, super scribe. He died in 2001.

In one of his short stories, "By Thy Good Pleasure," he writes about his father passing away on Good Friday.

"Everywhere (after the funeral) the afternoon sun was streaming down into the back yard... Everything was terribly, overwhelmingly alive. And Daddy was dead. He would never see those peach trees again."

So cruel, and yet so beautiful, this fourth month called April.

A stone marker

Last week I told you about Dr. Robert Drake, the UT English professor that made such an impression a decade ago.

Have to share an unexpected -- and poignant -- moment that happened earlier this week.

Dr. Drake has stayed on my mind, so I began looking for someone who could talk about him. A colleague. Another former student. A friend.

I have no idea what happened to the others in that Southern Lit class. I asked the English Department head, Chuck Maland, whether he knew of anyone. He suggested a professor emeritus, Allison Ensor.

That night I remembered the Robert Drake reader sitting on my bookshelf. Something clicked that two of his grad students edited the book.

And, sure enough, Randy Hendricks is still teaching at the same Georgia college at which he worked when the book was published. I sent him a note. He responded the next morning.

Later in the day came a second e-mail from the other editor of the book. He teaches up north. Both shared special memories, moments, the time Dr. Drake shot down James Perkins during a seminar, saying "So what?" to his argument.

Perkins told me that he noticed while visiting Drake's hometown Ripley, Tenn., a few years ago that his grave contained no stone marker. He arranged to have one placed there.

I am glad.

Dr. Drake deserves more, though. If nothing else than for his genteel, wonderfully anachronistic, conversational prose. More so, for the lives he touched, the careers he influenced, the work he encouraged.

This afternoon, I tracked down the literary journal that devoted several pages to him in the spring of 1992. It is on its way from Mississippi State.

It feels good. His life's work is still with me. And, therefore, so is he.

The last day of my favorite month

I don't think I'll ever forget him.

Dr. Robert Drake was my kind of character. I think I told you about him awhile back.

He was an English professor at UT, an old school type of guy, very Southern and very eccentric. He liked me because I loved history and old movies. We got along rather well.

I remember telling him, while he was having us read Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind," about a letter to the editor somebody from California sent to the USA Today taking the newspaper to task for writing about the film when it was re-released in the late 1990s. The writer said some bad things about both the film and the South.

"Who wrote this?" Dr. Drake asked.

"Some gentleman from California."

"That man," he said, looking at me over his spectacles, "is no gentleman."

Dr. Drake told me to never be afraid of somebody calling me a walking anachronism. He was a wonderful man and a great writer. He suffered a stroke near the end of that semester and never recovered. He died in 2001.

I thought about him Easter weekend because of his poignant short story, "By Thy Good Pleasure." In it, his beloved father dies on Good Friday. I couldn't locate a copy of the story that weekend, but I found it this morning at the Powell Branch Library. Something about it kept bouncing around in my brain. Here's what it was:

"Everywhere (after the funeral) the afternoon sun was streaming down into the back yard... . Everything was terribly, overwhelmingly alive. And Daddy was dead. He would never see those peach trees again."

I think that might be what Eliot meant when he wrote that April is the cruelest month. Because everything is so green, so beautiful, so wonderfully alive. Everything that real life usually isn't.

And then he writes something else:

"Daddy was maybe 18th century that way; he wasn't afraid of tears, and I guessed maybe it was because he wasn't afraid of love. Because you had to love in order to cry, and most people now were really afraid of love."

That last sentence is truer than most people can even fathom.

(Dr. Drake's collection of short stories is called "Amazing Grace." If any of you love old-fashioned genteel Southern literature, read some of his stories, if you can find the book. Most are semi-autobiographical tales of growing up in his beloved Ripley, Tenn.)

There is no real point here, no grand comment I want to make. Just a few things I thought about on the last day of my favorite month while driving to work in the dimmed light of an overcast morning.