Sunday Photo Evening

This is Jim, who started out as my college philosophy teacher and ended up as the dearest thing to me on earth. The photo is from '75--well before we met and before he cut his hair. He was into early music--played the viola de gamba well enough to perform--and was a Socratic in the truest sense. (The title of my blog--Dancing through the Minefield--was in fact the title of a presentation he gave on the ways in which radical feminism was overshooting its mark and undermining the university.) He retired to Athens with his Greek wife, and when I visited he took me to the ruins of Socrates' prison cell, and I stood at the entrance and lost my breath and couldn't enter it--a sacred space. But I have a photo of him standing in the center, staring at the ground.

The last time I saw him was when we were saying goodbye at the airport, and I started to cry because I knew I wouldn't see him again, and I felt there were things left unsaid. It was a year later that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died pretty quickly. I flew over to be with his wife, and she gave me his cap, his metronome, and a box of his papers. But in that year--after the visit, before the diagnosis--he'd already sent me the things I treasure most: lovely, lovely words: the ones a daughter would want to hear from her father. That relationship made me believe that adoption can work: that people who are otherwise unrelated can come together and find the bonds biology couldn't manage: that people we find and collect can complete us.

So, this Photo Sunday is dedicated to Jim, who enters my mind every single day, and still makes my life better by passing through it.