Category Archives: Personal Tributes

Matthew Perry, “Chandler,” and the Bigger, More Terrible Thing

Memorials, Miscellany, Personal Tributes,

Last night, Leslie and I sat in our living room chatting with my cousin Steve, who was visiting from Florida. Somehow, the conversation turned to Friends star Matthew Perry. As Leslie can attest, I have been talking a lot about Perry in recent weeks. In September, I decided to move well outside my area of interest and my literary comfort zone to read his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. I tried to describe to Steve the degree of Perry’s self-confessed addictions and the physical, mental, and emotional damage they have visited upon him. We talked of his 55 Vicodin per day habit, the corrupt people who helped him feed it, and how the opiates caused his colon to “explode,” nearly killing him and leaving him with a temporary colostomy bag. As to whether he was still using, I said that Perry wrote in the book’s closing chapter that he has stopped. I concluded on a pessimistic note, though. I didn’t see how anyone so severely addicted and with all that money could ever quit.

About 15 minutes later, our youngest child Quinn, who is a college student living on campus, sent Leslie a text message that read, “MATTHEW PERRY DEAD!”

I will state up front that I am not holding myself out as an authority on the life and career of Matthew Perry. With the exception of a handful of favorite actors and musicians, my opinions on celebrities and their usually self-imposed torments range from indifference to contempt. Until I picked up his book, my knowledge of Perry’s life and his struggles would have fit in one modest paragraph. To my surprise, I wasn’t twenty pages into this thing before I was thinking to myself, “I must write something about this book. My friends are going to be so surprised when I do.” I finished the memoir about five days ago; its author is now dead, and here I am writing something far different than what I had planned.

Like many people my age and younger, I watched Friends off and on during its original run and have occasionally watched since, though I was never a dedicated fan. I did think the writing was clever and funny and that the principal stars were immensely talented. It was light. It was breezy. The characters were lovable and quirky, and if you watched it just to laugh and relax, you would; I did, anyway. I remember the first time I saw the show. Leslie always watched it. She and I were engaged, and I happened to be at her house when it came on. It was season 2, episode five (yes, I had to look that up): “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant,” in which Ross, Monica, and Chandler, all relatively successful in professional careers, are not sensitive to the financial problems of Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel, who are struggling in dead-end jobs. This puts a strain on their friendships: a problem that seems relatable enough.

It is fashionable, today, for people to burnish their images by denouncing Friends: It was trivial. It was a series of one-liners. It was unrealistic. It belabored story arcs. It wasn’t diverse. It was insensitive. None of these is universally true of the show, but each has some validity. It is easy to forget, though, that Friends, like every other entertainment offering, was simply a reflection of its time. The show was nothing less than an entertainment phenomenon during its run, and it did feature, for those who chose to see them, themes that mattered: the angst of modern twenty-somethings trying to find their way in a complex and changing urban landscape; the search for love and acceptance; the post-modern phenomenon, often noted by sociologists, of young adults in the developed world moving beyond their birth families, not to marry and establish their own, but to cling to a new kind of “family” made up of peers: “Friends.” I can attest that Friends is not a generational relic, either. I teach in a high school. Just days ago, I saw a student wearing a T-shirt with the Friends logo, and a student-made poster hanging in the hall features “Central High” in a style obviously meant to mimic the logo of Central Perk, the coffee shop that serves as a gathering place on the show. Nearly twenty years after its final episode, Friends is hip again.

I estimate that I have seen maybe a fourth of the 236 Friends episodes. That’s just a guess. Leslie and I have divergent TV tastes, so now, in the age of streaming, we try to have something serious and something light to enjoy together. A few weeks ago, we decided, for our light fare, to begin streaming Friends. As I watched the smiling, handsome, and seemingly healthy “Chandler” who splashed in a fountain in the opening credits degenerate into the drawn, 130 pound ghost of late season 2, I decided to read Perry’s book.

I was utterly shocked by much of what I read even early in Perry’s story. His parents were numbered among the “beautiful people.” They met when his father, a musician, was performing at a beauty pageant in which his mother, the previous year’s winner, was to crown the new queen. His parents’ marriage ended early on, and little Matthew grew insecure and troubled. His mother became Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, while his father went to California to pursue his dream of acting, which resulted in his becoming the “Old Spice Man” of advertising fame. Who knew?

Perry was drinking by 14, was in California pursuing his own acting career by about 16, and had some success. Eventually, he was drinking entire bottles of vodka (“the kind with the handle”) in one night and became so hopelessly addicted to opiates that he required more than 50 per day just to function. Along the way, he used his incredible sense of comedic timing, his unique speech cadences, and his undeniable charm to win one of the most coveted acting roles in Hollywood: “Chandler Bing,” in what was then called Friends Like Us.”

In his memoir, Perry outlines how the main cast members were all warned that their lives were about to change forever and how they all became unbelievably rich. His love for his fellow members of the Friends sextet was unconditional to the end. He reveals his unrequited longing for Jennifer Aniston; how Courteney Cox demanded equal billing for all six actors, when she, with her previous sitcom success, might have demanded more than the others; and how David Schwimmer, already well-known in some circles, matched Cox’s selflessness when he insisted that all six actors negotiate for salary as a unit, rather than separately. Schwimmer, Perry asserts, made them all multi-millionaires. Matt LeBlanc, says Perry, was the cast member who had the least to lose and who grew the most on the show. Lisa Kudrow was the funniest person he ever knew.

As I read Big Terrible Thing, I grew more fond of the show and reflected more about the cult of celebrity and what it must have been like for these six young, beautiful, talented, and mostly unknown people to suddenly be caught up in this whirlwind. Perry, and probably all the rest of them, had prayed for fame and fortune, but that could not have prepared them for the magnitude of what came. I found it endearing that they clung to, and fought for, and defended each other. Never was this more the case than when the others had to close ranks to help their friend Matthew Perry, who descended into his personal hell despite (as he regularly points out) the money and the fame he had so craved.

Big Terrible Thing is not a happy book. It is the story of a talented, successful, and very rich young man who, as he implies, would have traded it all to be normal and to be able to live his life without poisoning himself. It has moments that remind the reader how different our ordinary lives are from those of the rich and famous. In one account, Perry is in a wildly expensive drug and alcohol rehabilitation center (one of many in his lifetime) in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The center discharged him with, he thought, an agreement that a California physician with whom they consulted would place him on a maintenance regimen of his favorite opioids. He arrived home to find that the California doctor refused to do so, saying he only had to “consult” with the doctors in Switzerland but did not have to follow their instructions. Perry made a call, put down $170,000 to charter a private jet, and flew back to Switzerland for his drugs that very night.

Not surprisingly, a man living such a life has many opportunities for reflection and to develop bitter hatreds. Perry hated people who said addicts should just “quit.” He hated the “industry” of high-end drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities that cater to celebrities and the wealthy, considering them opportunistic scams set up to part desperate people from their money. He hated (in no uncertain terms) the manufacturers of colostomy bags because of the poor quality and humiliating failures of their products. Indeed one of the things that finally did induce him to stay clean toward the end was the fear, instilled in him by a brutally honest doctor, that if he required another colostomy it would likely be permanent.

Perry’s years of suffering also left him with sincere loves. He loved his mother and father, despite his rocky relationships with them and the undeniable truth that they often failed him when he was a child. He loved Julia Roberts, one of the most famous and beautiful women in the world, who pursued him when he was only just becoming known and became his girlfriend. He amazed her by breaking it off with her, not because he didn’t want her, but because he was terrified she would desert him. He loved Alcoholics Anonymous because it doesn’t give up on people no matter how many times they fail and because, when he was able, it allowed him to help other addicts. He loved everyone directly connected to Friends. Indeed, there were times when his love for the show and his unwillingness to let down the cast and ruin their lives was the only thing keeping him alive. He loved life. This last seems unlikely, but he said so over and over. He was, at heart, a happy person who lived to make people laugh, something he had been doing almost since he could walk.

At the end of his memoir, Matthew Perry, whom, he had written earlier, you the reader may know by “another name,” professed that he was clean and sober but physically destroyed; covered in scars, both physical and emotional; and quite alone when he might be sitting with any one of a dozen beautiful women watching his children play. Over and over, he said or implied two things: through it all he wanted to live, and money and fame don’t fix you if you’re broken, no matter how ridiculous those without money and fame might find such an assertion.

Matthew Perry, “Chandler Bing,” died last night. He embraced his own troubled life, and he dreaded death, a bigger and even more terrible thing. He drowned in a hot tub at his home. Early reports indicate there were no drugs present. A month ago, I barely would have noticed; now I find myself quite saddened by it all and wishing he could have lived to win back some of what he lost and to help more people. I guess that’s the power of the written word.

Long Shadow Revisited

Miscellany, Personal Tributes, Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity, ,

Five years have passed since I published, on American Path[o]s, “August’s Long Shadow,” a personal memoir of the the events surrounding the 1988 murder of my friend and fraternity brother Thomas Baer (kevinterralbrewer.com/baer/). Looking back, I am struck by the degree to which this one written piece has impacted my conception of who I am and certainly of who I was. My blog is a simple hobby and, admittedly, one on which I expend little energy. With retirement approaching, I daydream that someday it may yet become a going concern, but for now I repost my old research papers and pound out the occasional history-related tale, trying to bring dead presidents and others back to life using essentially the same story telling techniques that have kept me in work and, I am told, successfully so, for nearly three decades. I am content with this.

“August’s Long Shadow” is different, though. I didn’t know it at the time, but it is.

As I have said before, the piece is memoir, not history. When I first began writing, in considerable secrecy, in the spring of 2018, I wasn’t so sure. At the time, I did think someone could, perhaps should, write a history of the case. I had the training to do it, on a modest scale at least, and I had personal connections with many of the principals that would make some of the surely voluminous research easier. All of the research necessary for such an undertaking would not be easy, however, and the prospect of wading through the archives of the Knoxville papers; the Knoxville Police Department; and, God forbid, the University of Tennessee, while working a full-time job and raising children, was daunting, especially when the university, in particular, would have no incentive to cooperate with such a project and might arguably have incentives not to. There were other concerns. A history would have to be nearly perfect, scrupulously documented, and, importantly, could not be written without approaching more distant people, some of whom would surely resent the intrusion. That I was not willing to do. As I, myself, observed in the memoir, we all have uneasy relationships with the scars of August 1988. A memoir would be different. I could simply interview a few good friends who were happy to help; double-check my own recollections (several of which were proved mistaken, requiring revisions in the text) surrounding an event that I, after all, did not personally witness; and consider and then relate in prose how that event impacted my life, the lives of those closest to me, and my beloved fraternity. Self-indulgent, perhaps, but it is a blog, after all. That I, at some level, needed to write such an account never really occurred to me until it was nearly complete.

A few years ago, I sought out and wrote an old friend who was an important part of my life in those long ago days, seeking input on this project and writing, “Too many things happened to me at the same time back then (you too, I think).” I never received a reply; the past does not speak to everyone. I almost envy those it spares, because it never stops speaking to me.

So, I had written a memoir, and to my surprise, I discovered that it peeled away multiple layers of my own young adult life. Every day that I worked on the project, I realized more and more that it was, ultimately, a short, focused autobiography of sorts. It became, in the end, a story not only of a tragedy that ended the life of a friend and disrupted a beautiful part of my young world, but also of how other events—my college graduation (with no family present); my first, troubled days in law school; my brother Tim’s devastating A.L.S. diagnosis (the reason for my lonely graduation); and a new and ill-timed relationship with a much loved girlfriend—intersected that awful, empty event at 1800 Lake Avenue and upset the equilibrium of my happy life.

Of the tragedy itself, I can say that my perspective on it defies the passage of time. I can see and almost feel it all: that dreadful night of phone calls, isolated in my apartment in Memphis, cut off from my suffering and bewildered friends; the melancholy November drive across the state with Ron Powers to visit my emotionally wounded fraternity brothers, my girl, and the scene of the crime, a dim warning from F. Scott Fitzgerald—of all people—fluttering in the recesses of my mind, whispering that what I found there might not be as it was when I left it; a far later visit to the same place to confront the ghosts and to acknowledge that it was, indeed and finally, over. I have heard it said that we write to get to know ourselves. That was my experience in 2018. It wasn’t just introspection, either; a young colleague approached me after reading the memoir and said solemnly, “I feel that I understand you better after reading that.”

“That’s funny,” I thought, “I had the same experience writing it.”

My blog has few readers, and for now, at least, I don’t particularly care, but hardly a week goes by that someone, somewhere in the world doesn’t at least open “August’s Long Shadow.” Over the years, this has led to moving and sometimes chilling exchanges. It has put me in touch with Tom’s sister and, indirectly, his father. Several of Tom’s cousins and other relatives and friends have thanked me for writing about him in a way that illuminated a little of his lovely, quirky nature, and that was touching. Others, total strangers, wrote to chat and to share with me their own memories of August 20, 1988. A woman wrote that she was in the condos across Terrace Avenue on the night of the murder and watched the drama unfold from her window. She was, she said, so traumatized that she left U.T. the next day and never returned. A man named John wrote saying he could supply key information about why the murder occurred. He had been in an altercation with Underwood, the killer, the night before and, since he lived near the Phi Kappa Tau house, speculated that Underwood may have thought he was a member of our fraternity. This explained so much if true, as Tom’s assailant had asked for “John” the first time he entered our house that night. The man said he would contact me in a few days with more information and would consent to an interview. When I did not hear anything, I contacted him. He said he had changed his mind and didn’t want to be involved. Finally, a few years ago, a United States attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee wrote me seeking contact with the Baer family. The killer, predictably, was in custody again, charged with being a felon in possession of firearms, and the government wanted the Baers to have a say in what would happen next. I passed the information on to Tom’s sister, who has become something of a social media friend, but I didn’t follow up. It had been 33 years; the shadow is long indeed.

Human memory is beautiful, painful, and essential to who and what we are. Unfortunately, it is also something of a blunt tool at times, maybe most of the time, maybe always. Reconnecting, not just with what “happened” (always a tricky proposition in academic history) but with what people felt when it happened, can hone our memories and elevate mere chronicle into something worth chronicling. Some say the more emotion we let creep into our memories the less useful they become in any historical sense. Maybe. But who cares? And do we really want to live without that? As David McCullough, a man who spent his life writing with heart about the past once said, ” No harm’s done to history by making it something that someone would want to read.” In exploring and documenting our own pasts and embracing all the happiness and pain we find there, we can discover all kinds of truths and connections that were hidden just out of sight. What better use could be made of writing? That was my experience in recounting my own memories of the death of Tom Baer—a good young man who did good things, loved everyone without judgment, and inspired love in return—and how it has coursed through so many lives over the decades, including the lives of some who, like me, were not there to witness it but nevertheless found themselves swept up in its wake.

K.T.B.
August 2023

An Open Letter to the People of Big Sandy, Tennessee and to All Friends and Supporters of Big Sandy School

Miscellany, Personal Tributes

Dear friends,

My earliest memory of Big Sandy School is a scary one.

When Tim, my older brother, was in the first grade, my mother brought all three of us, with Greg just a two-year-old, to the school library for a PTC meeting. Someone had the idea to take all the children who were big enough to the gym to run and play while the adults did Parent-Teacher Conference business. One of the aging, gray-haired ladies with cat-eye glasses who seemed to run everything in that long-ago time agreed to supervise. Greg stayed behind, of course, but Tim and I joined in with some other kids and went into that vast, cavernous space with the devil’s face painted in the middle of the floor. I was four and had almost never been away from my mother, except with relatives, and I was not a fan of the devil’s face (no cartoon devil he), so I protested—loudly. Concluding that I was too young to participate without being a pain, the old lady sent me back. Someone escorted me into the door of the school building and left me there. The hall lights were not even on. All good mothers can recognize their children’s shrieks, and no one had a better mother than I did, so my shrieks came loudly and clearly, and Mom came running. I was none the worse for wear, but I do remember it, and Mom told that story with a flash of anger for the next fifty years.

That was in 1969.

I suppose Big Sandy School has always been a part of me.

I was a student at Big Sandy from 1971 until I graduated in 1983. Believe me, it was no part of my plan to return. I loved living in Knoxville, and I wanted to be a lawyer, but like the protagonist in Mr. Holland’s Opus (or like Gabe Kotter, if you prefer a less ostentatious simile) I felt at times that fate was conspiring behind the scenes not just to push me into a classroom, but to push me back to my old school. My brother Tim’s long struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, my discovery that I did not like the law nearly as much as I liked the history of the law, and changes in my own life led to a teaching license in 1990 and, in the fall of 1995, to Big Sandy School. I didn’t seek the job; it sought me. I didn’t even apply for it. Sometimes the world works that way.

For the first three years I was a teacher at Big Sandy, I did not even have a classroom. Many of you remember what it was like there in those days, with K-12 in one building: halls so crowded between classes that you could barely move; courses meeting in dressing rooms, storage rooms, and abandoned bathrooms; teachers having to vacate their rooms during planning time so someone else could teach there. In the fall of 1998, the new high school building opened. I found my new quarters, unfurled my maps, grabbed a cup of coffee, and room 208 at the end of the hall became the nerve center of history education on the north end of Benton County.

Now, 28 years after I returned, the halls aren’t crowded anymore, there are rooms to spare, and I have been teaching two classes per day in Camden since August. Whatever accidents or designs of fate led me, all those years ago, back to where I started and into room 208, where no one else has ever taught, have changed course. On May 19, I will teach my last class at Big Sandy. Next year, along with the high school student body, I will be relocating full time to Camden Central High. I knew this day was coming, but I have heard people talk about it since the 1970s, and when you hear something discussed for that long it becomes difficult to think of it as real.

I have long cast nervous glances at the changing landscape of my workplace, with so many old friends and mentors gone and so much energy lost, and wondered how it would all turn out. In my personal daydream, Big Sandy High’s last day always came on my last day as a teacher. I would make a General MacArthur-like valedictory address to the masses, bask in their applause and adulation, and the school and I would fade away together. It wasn’t to be, though. It’s too soon to retire, and now I face a difficult task, a task complicated by my age, of which I am increasingly aware. I have to transplant what I hope was a worthwhile career, one that touched people’s hearts and minds, into a new and bigger place where the magic—and at times it did feel like magic—may not work. If the magic fails, it will not be the fault of the people of Camden Central High School, where I have good friends, some of whom were once colleagues at Big Sandy. The people there have welcomed me with warmth and support, and the administrators of both the school and the district have done everything in their power to smooth this transition.

Twenty-eight years ago, I was at the bottom of my own school’s seniority list; today I am number 25 for the entire district. For all those years moving up the list, I am indebted to many people associated with Big Sandy School, but for fear of leaving someone out I am going to name only one. It was Mrs. Diane Padgett who reached out to me and offered me this job; she always, always believed I had “it,” whatever “it” is, and she was happy to have me back. That was a life-changing phone call, and I am eternally grateful to her.

I will not lie; it is going to be painful to walk out of BSHS. I have probably spent more time in my Big Sandy School classroom than in any home I have ever lived in, and I suspect I have spent more of my life on the school’s few acres of land than in any other place. I am ambivalent as to whether that denotes success or failure on my part. I have been able to impact a lot of lives there, and I do hope that most of those people believe they have benefited from my efforts. There have been many times when I reflected that I once had “bigger” dreams, but then I look around and see people with “bigger” lives who have little to feel good about at the end of the week. I never had that problem. My work at our little school was difficult, frustrating, and sometimes infuriating, but it was work that mattered, and that, my friends, is priceless.

So, thank you, Big Sandy, for your tireless support of my efforts to teach at your—our—school. When you pause to think of it, it is quite something to have people entrust their children to you, day after day, for so many years. It was a real honor, and I learned at least as much from the students as they learned from me.

To the surprise of no one, I will close with an anecdote from history. In February 1861, with the country going to pieces, president-elect Abraham Lincoln left his adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois to travel to the nation’s capital, “not knowing when or whether ever” he would return (he did not). He left to me a better closing line for my career at Big Sandy than I could ever write for myself:

“My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.”

K.T.B

May 2023

I had a Teacher: A Tribute to Mary Lou Marks on her Retirement

Miscellany, Personal Tributes 
I originally published this tribute in 2017 as a “note” on Facebook. Facebook no longer supports notes and has even deleted them. I narrowly managed to save this one and am publishing it here on my blog for safekeeping. Mrs. Marks has since unretired and re-retired. No matter what she does, this tribute is from the heart and will stay the same.

One Thursday night, 34 years ago this month, I stood capped and gowned in a graduation reception line at my high school. Among those who came by to congratulate my classmates and me was our English teacher for the 8th, 9th, 11th, and 12th grades. In her polished (read: non-country) delivery, she posed an unexpected question: “Mr. Brewer,” she began, employing a formality to which I was little accustomed, “have you ever seen The Graduate?” 

I had not. 

She quickly explained that in the graduation party scene at the beginning of the famous 1967 film, Mr. McGuire, a business executive of some kind, takes young Benjamin Broddock aside and gives him one cryptic word of advice for his future: “plastics.” 

“My word to you, Kevin,” she continued, “is nonfiction.” 

This woman, whom I had known for years, had admired, and had sometimes feared, went on to say, with the same candor she might use if addressing an adult peer, that I had talent, that I had gifts, that I had something to contribute. Even as an unsophisticated 18-year-old from a microscopic town, I had the discernment to realize that, in this hurried exchange in a sweltering cafeteria, I had received a special dispensation from someone whose opinion mattered—someone who did not trade in idle flattery on special occasions, or on any occasion. 

I first became aware of Mary Lou Marks as a young child. She was the “big kids’” English teacher who, each morning as I waited for the bus, passed my house in a brown Ford Pinto. She seemed intimidating, and the buzz was that she was “different.” I was not optimistic; there were few greater sins than being “different” in 1970s Benton County. I, for one, wanted no part of it. 

It was not until I appeared in her class for eighth grade English, in the fall of 1978, that I came to know her personally. My friends and I did not know what to make of her. It was true: she was not like us. We were as country as turnip greens; she, decidedly, was not. It was clear she was from the North, but she wasn’t a Yankee of the “aunt so-and-so moved up north during the war” school. I knew many of those kinds of Yankees and Yankee poseurs. They were from Akron or Detroit or Cleveland and spent much of their time there making money and pretending they were not from here, before retiring to move back here to live on the cheap among the common rabble. This was different. Her dialect was unfamiliar, rich and precise, and while she made it look easy, it always seemed as though she had chosen each word with great care. When she spoke, it seemed I was not merely hearing the words, but hearing the years of thought, education, and experience that had cultivated the words. I soon pieced together the essential facts of the story: this woman was an honest-to-God New Englander—perhaps the first I ever knew—and more than that, she was an intellectual. She was from Connecticut, for God’s sake! Were people from Connecticut? For her, New York was a real place to which one might dash for a little Christmas shopping. To us, it was dimly remembered scenes from Family Affair, or, more recently, the credits for All in the Family. 

She was not like us. 

With some exceptions, there are few more rude and worrisome creatures than middle-school age boys. This interloper with the careful diction, the big vocabulary, and the love of poetry wasn’t going to push us around! I languidly joined in the resistance, but my heart wasn’t in it. My parents did not tolerate bad behavior if they knew about it, and, in truth, I was different too. While my friends were hunting or fishing or raising hell with older kids, I was sitting at home building models, pondering time travel, and reading the World Book Encyclopedia. I had a college undergraduate’s knowledge of US presidential history by age 10 and a college graduate’s knowledge of it by age 14. I wrote stories. I loved words. My curiosity knew no bounds. In time, I began to make common cause with this scholarly young English teacher. 

And we worked. Perhaps the most shocking thing about Mrs. Marks’ class was that we were not just always occupied but were always occupied with something that mattered. This was a revelation. Once per week, we learned ten new vocabulary words. I can still remember some of them—can in fact still see her writing them on the board in that old firetrap classroom with the giant, wavy glass window. What words they were! Macabre, limn, complement (not compliment!), vapid, esoteric. Mrs. Marks would write the phonetic spelling, complete with the vowel signs, first, and we would try to pronounce them before we saw the actual spelling. This was one of my favorite activities. I found I was quite good at it, and, to my delight, she thought so too.  

The years went by. Mrs. Marks was my English teacher for both the 8th and 9th grades. She took off the 1980-1981 school year to have a child. I was not amused, but I was glad to see her back for my junior year. By then, I was confident, enthusiastic, and a devourer of books. There seemed to be a special level of understanding between us. When she instructed the class to choose a major work for our junior book report, I came to her with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I knew of Steinbeck, but I knew nothing about the book, and she seemed concerned. After giving it some thought, she said she was going to let me report on it. East of Eden was “mature,” she said, adding, “I probably would not let any other student do it, but I’ll let you do it.” Flattered, I threw myself into this painful novel, with its tortured psyches; its notorious, fetishistic brothels; and its deeply flawed characters. As I read, and as the story became more troubling, I sensed the trust that Mrs. Marks had reposed in me with this assignment, and the risks she was taking. When the time came to write my report, I dispensed with euphemisms, boldly incorporating the word whorehouse into my text. I felt that I was taking a chance using such an offensive term in a book report for a female teacher (or any teacher), but she trusted me, so I trusted her. She never said a word about it. She treated that daring word as though she had run across it in The New Yorker, rather than in a high school junior’s book report. More than three decades later, I can still recall how it felt to be treated that way—like an adult, maybe even a budding intellectual. 

In my senior year, we did more writing, more reading, and more speaking. The latter has served me well. Here, too, I took chances because Mrs. Marks allowed it. For my spoken piece, which I was to annotate for emphasis, breathing, and inflection, I chose the ghastly shooting scene from William Manchester’s The Death of a President:  

The Lincoln continues to slow down. Its interior is a place of horror. The last bullet has torn through John Kennedy’s cerebellum, the lower part of his brain. Leaning toward her husband Jacqueline Kennedy has seen a serrated piece of his skull—flesh-colored; not white—detach itself. At first there is no blood. And then, in the very next instant, there is nothing but blood . . .  

Today, it is easy to imagine a teacher rejecting a request to work with such material. Mrs. Marks knew it mattered to me, so she allowed it. I guess that is why I still remember it so clearly. In retrospect, I can see that her test for such things was good faith. Anything worthwhile that you wanted, in good faith, to do, she encouraged. Accordingly, that spring, she signed my final yearbook:  

Kevin- 

‘The cure for boredom is curiosity.  

There is no cure for curiosity.’ 

Keep your open mind and  

inquiring spirit and the  

world will be yours. 

 

Mary Lou Marks 

 

As my final year of high school drew to its close, I knew I was well-prepared for the verbal and literary challenges of college, and I knew it was time for a change. I was ready. I guess Mrs. Marks felt the need for a change too. I was not surprised to learn that my last day as a student at Big Sandy School was to be her last there as a teacher. As I went away to college, she was settling into her new position as the librarian and media specialist at Camden Central High. She has been there ever since, compiling material, transitioning to electronic media, and—unsurprisingly—running writing workshops for the students there.  

I never became the great writer, but I write still—nonfiction, mostly—and I did become a teacher. Though not at the same school, Mrs. Marks and I have now been colleagues in the Benton County school system for 22 years. During that time, we have had many opportunities to share ideas, written passages, and social criticism; Facebook has made this easier still. Now, at long last, she has decided to retire. I know what she will do: she will travel, and raise her flowers, and visit museums and art exhibits, and watch her grandchildren grow up. And she will read, and read, and read. Behind her, she will leave several generations of men and women from a pair of small towns who will never forget what she gave to them: eyes and ears attuned to words; the ability to connect the imaginary to the concrete; the capacity to gaze across time and space through a book or a story or a poem and to feel the still-beating hearts of writers long dead. 

I hope the people of Benton County know how fortunate they have been to have, in their schools, this cultured, literate teacher, who has given selflessly to them, their children, and probably their grandchildren, for nearly four decades. A few years back, Mrs. Marks commented about my vocabulary and my love of history and words. I replied to her the only way I felt I could. I said simply, “I had a teacher who cared about words and beauty and culture and taught me to do the same.”  

I know that in this I am not alone. 

Well done, Mrs. Marks. 

Well done.