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.

Lunch with 'Uncle Paul'

A smile crept onto my face the minute I saw the ol' professor alight from his car.

He was an enigma in the classroom, always challenging your statements, forever encouraging you to "think analytically," to quote a favorite phrase. But anybody who knows him will tell you that Paul Pinckney's greatest strength is his personal touch.

To put it simply, Paul cared about his students. He'd take time with you, invite you up to the library study to chat, offer advice about classes, books, girls and what to do with your life. He is an educator in the best sense of what that means.

We met for lunch this afternoon at Aubrey's in Powell. I smiled at the familiar speech patterns of his voice, my thoughts transported back nearly a decade, to the corner classroom in the Humanities building at UT. I did have to strain to hear him over the blaring '70s pop songs playing in the restaurant. What a disconnect it is to merge talk about history and politics with Maureen McGovern telling us at the top of her lungs that there's got to be a morning after, if we can hold on through the storm...

Anyway, Paul's doing well, despite some recent health problems. He and wife Margaret took recent trips to Charlotte to see family and to Memphis to see friends. He's teaching his Revolutions in World Perspective course at UT during the second summer term, says the Churchill course is more difficult to offer in the summer.

He takes a nap in the afternoons and watches "SportsCenter" with Margaret before eating dinner at 7:30. Sometimes he'll take a quick look at Chris Matthews and "Hardball" before heading to the table.

Paul worries about the Churchill myths that keep popping up in popular culture, even by those who should know better. (Evan Thomas in Newsweek is the latest example.) Yes, ol' Winston saw the Nazi threat early on. But he wasn't really the lone lion roaring at the gates. Not quite.

He thinks that Bush has been a great bust, sees the parallels between Bush's mistakes in Iraq with the Kennedy/Johnson mistakes in Vietnam. He still sings in his church choir, stays busy visiting friends and doing things with Margaret. He says he misses talking to young people on a regular basis.

And that's the thing about Paul Pinckney. At the end of the day, it always came back to his students. Overlook all that scholarly stuff, just forget about it for a moment. Paul Pinckney's greatest legacy lies in the lives he touched, in the way he could stir a student's soul describing the poignancy of the World War I memorial in France, or the horrible waste in Flanders Field.

He's a special soul, the embodiment of what a college professor should be, someone I'm quite proud to call a friend.

Thanks for lunch, Uncle Paul.

Heather

Her name was Heather and I don't suspect I'll ever forget her. She was the perfect antidote to a rotten few days. Have a seat; here's the story.

We ducked into Chili's after the UT game earlier tonight. Don't know the final score, but Tennessee was leading by more than 50 points when we made our way to the exit. Poor MTSU. It was brutal.

Anyway, the server came up and asked for our order. She was attractive, but at first I didn't take more than a passing notice.

Then she made a joke at my expense. I was angry to begin with, even brooded a minute about it. After awhile, she came back around and started chatting, first about UT basketball, then about "stuff."

Heather was a football trainer at UT. She loved her job, said she cried the day she left it. She's from Middle Tennessee and plans to return there to finish up her master's degree, although she says she'd love to return to The Hill one day as an athletic trainer.

She turned down a softball scholarship to Middle Tennessee State -- a full ride -- to attend Tennessee. Heather had her mind made up that UT was where she was headed after going to her first football game.

"I wanted to run through the 'T' once, and I ended up running through it 13 times," she said.

She later went to school awhile in Chattanooga, but said she hated that.

Heather doesn't much like the restaurant bid'ness either. It's a holding pattern toward her ultimate goal.

I'm a sucker for a pretty smile, but what I liked most about Heather is what I always like most -- her personality. We chatted with her for only a few minutes, this stranger serving our food, and yet she seemed like an old friend, somebody we'd gone to school with, getting caught up on life in the preceding years. I found myself talking all about me, too --- my failed ambition to become a history professor, stuff I never talk about.

I'll remember her smile and her looks, but most of all I'll remember her likable, outgoing self.

When we got up to leave, I wanted to say something, make a fool of myself, do whatever, to keep the moment alive. The ol' conservative spirit inside me said she probably gets hit on by every jerk that walks in the door; the insecure fella buried deep within told me I'd never have a chance with somebody like her. That little voice refuses to vanish completely; it tells me a lot about myself that it won't go.

So instead I said, "Take it easy."

"Bye, hon," she said.

Bye, Heather. Hope you make it back to UT.