A few days ago I was up at the barn looking through a file cabinet full of old documents trying to find some paper work on the 1979 purchase of my Martin D-35 guitar…going to find out if they’re serious about their lifetime guarantee policy. Never did find what I was looking for, but in the process I came across about a three inch thick bundle tied together with twine and labeled “Lit Papers”. For the next forty-five minutes I sat under the glow of a bare bulb hanging from the barn’s rafters and thumbed through the three dozen or so college papers I’d written as a English Literature major in undergraduate and graduate school. I quickly skimmed the typewritten theses and the bold, if somewhat naïve, proofs I’d offered for each but slowed down to relish the hand written notes made by my professors. It was a love fest written in a dozen different scrawls and I was the object of every writer’s affection. There were no B’s, and certainly no C’s; all the papers received A’s or A-minuses and even several A-pluses.
The collection of old essays written over the course of three years…junior and senior years and first year as a Master’s candidate…represented one of the happiest times in my life. During the summer between my lower division freshman and sophomore years and my upper division years, when nearly all my classes were in my major, I’d gone from a D and C student who struggled every day just to stay afloat to a straight A student, consistently at or near the top of every literature and writing class in which I enrolled. I had, in fact, been a dismal student through my grade, middle and high school and community college years, shining only in those rare instances in which what I thought and wrote, as opposed to what I was supposed to memorize, were the basis of my grades. But as soon as I’d survived, by the skin of my teeth, the last of my general ed course work and started in earnest on my major, I was a new person, with a new identity. I suddenly loved every minute I spent in, or spent preparing for, the classes I took, and the passion I felt showed in the work I was producing.
When I’d gotten to the bottom of the stack, which I’d organized chronologically some four decades earlier, I came to a ten page manuscript with a cover page that read: Comparisons and Contrasts Between Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream–Defining Qualities of Tragedy and Comedy; Wednesday Night Shakespearean Seminar; Richard Cornish; May 5, 1971; Dr. Pepper. Underneath the neatly typed title and boilerplate was a scrawled note written in red ink. “A+…Mr. Cornish, another very insightful analysis. I warn you however, this is the last A grade you will receive from me until you do something about your atrocious spelling. Not even close to the minimum standards expected in a masters candidate at this institution, and clearly not a way to begin what could be a distinguished career in academia. This is no idle threat, sir. Still, I must say, you do know how to turn a phrase. Dr. P”
The Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream paper was the last piece of literary criticism I would ever write, the Wednesday night seminar the last lit course in which I’d ever enroll. Sitting there alone in the stillness of the old wood frame barn, I re-read Dr. Pepper’s note. The essay represented to me a turning point in my life, no doubt one of the most important before or since. I strained to piece together the fragments of what I remembered from that time so long ago…the epiphanal moment, as James Joyce coined it, that led to the joltingly abrupt re-routing of my entire life, and the frame that must have been there but which was now little more than shadowy assumptions of what I must have been thinking and feeling at the time. How does it happen that the events of a single evening can so completely alter the course of one’s existence? A weighty question to ponder while sitting on a paint-spattered old sawhorse in a musty outbuilding, but ponder it I did.
That the professor who was among my top two or three all-time favorite instructors would be the very same person who caused me to become a graduate school drop out is more than a little ironic but, well, there it is. Dr. Horatio Pepper appeared each Wednesday evening dressed in a dark three-piece suit, starched white shirt and usually a brilliantly colored bow tie. He had a full head of curly, salt-and-pepper hair, was no taller than five feet three inches and rotund but in a dignified way. In fact, everything about the professor, save his name, screamed out dignity. All of that, plus the intrinsic look of sagacity that all men with owlish features enjoy…face as perfectly round as a pie pan, a small beak of a nose, huge unblinking eyes made severe by bushy, arched brows and, of course, heavy and dark horn-rimmed glasses. Dr. P was beyond stereotype; he transcended cliché and for me, (and for most of our little band of scholars…fourteen grave and dedicated seekers of truth who wanted nothing more than to stand in front of their own students some day), he was the perfect package, the complete picture of what you’d expect to find in the moderator of a graduate level discussion of the Great Bard. Oh, and Dr. Pepper was a terrific teacher, too.
All term long our professor had promised that before we finished the semester he would deliver an entire lecture using his doctoral dissertation. It was to be our treat, our “friendly picker-upper” he joked borrowing from the tired old Dr. Pepper soda pop jingle. From any other professor, well, most other professors, such a promise would be seen as the height of arrogant pomposity. But every lit master’s candidate since the beginning of time took Pepper’s famous Shakespearean seminar if he could manage to get into it. No one doubted the lecture would be a special treat.
It was in early May, with just a handful of Wednesday nights left, that Dr. P brought his dissertation in. He carried the spiral bound copies in a cardboard box under one arm, his leather satchel under the other. As the bound, dog-eared booklets were passed around to each member of our little conclave, Dr. Pepper warned that the copies of the dissertation would be collected at the end of class that evening.
“Make no mistake,” he boomed in his strong, almost operatic baritone, “that writing in the margins of these texts, however tempting, will have a calamitous effect on your final grade. CALAMITOUS.”
Each of us eagerly took a copy and immediately began thumbing through it, beginning, of course, on the cover page; with all the talk all semester long, Dr. Pepper hadn’t once told us the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and there, in big bold letters, was the title:
Shakespeare’s Morning Repast: Repertory Allusions Emerging from Dietary Patterns of Elizabethan Society by Dr. Horatio R. Pepper
I read it a second time, and then a third. I was sure I was missing something, misreading. I went on to the abstract…
‘The dissertation will propose that the dietary choices, particularly those of morning repast, (breakfast), which were available to Shakespeare and, more specifically, for which he showed a preference, played a hitherto under reported but, in the whole, remarkable part in the types of scenes, character names, and turns of phrase recurring from play to play in his vast repertoire.’
No, I hadn’t misread. The title of the dissertation was wholly descriptive of its proposal, and as the realization sunk in I felt the blood rush to my head, leaving me in a state of confusion…almost panic. As Dr. Pepper plunged into his lecture, I sat continuing to leaf through the manuscript, hearing only random words and phrases. Gradually, as I alternated between reading and listening, I managed to grasp with lethal certainty that one of my all-time favorite professors, my guide through the magnificent upper stratum of serious literary study, had chosen as the subject of his Ph.D. a one hundred and twenty page speculation on what the greatest English writer of all time ate for breakfast. The absurdity of it caught me like a sucker-punch.
And, far from surprising, at that ephiphanal instant my thoughts turned to the past three years of my life and, necessarily, to the years that were sure to follow as I transitioned from school to career. Before long, I’d tuned out the lecture entirely and allowed my mind to race through a litany of questions, questions to which, I realized with growing alarm, I had no answers. When exactly had I decided I’d teach at college level? Had I decided or, like most other things in my life, had I just drifted unconsciously into it. Did I really want to stay in this barely post-adolescent world of university life until I grew old? Why did I think that when it came time for me to select the proposal for my own doctoral dissertation it would be any less surreal or out-of-touch than that of Dr. Pepper’s? And, really, why was my reaction to the Shakespeare breakfast thing so visceral?
During our 8:30 break I quickly gathered up my belongings and stuffed them into my backpack, being careful to leave behind my spiral bound copy of Shakespeare’s Morning Repast: Repertory Allusions Emerging from Dietary Patterns of Elizabethan Society by Dr. Horatio R. Pepper, and went home. It was raining hard as I rode my Honda Superhawk on the slick streets, west on San Fernando, south on South Second Street to Virginia Avenue and then one block over to South Third Street and home. Claudia was surprised to see me.
“You’re not cutting are you? Bad, bad boy, I didn’t think they allowed that in graduate school,” she teased. I smiled lamely but didn’t respond. Instead, I dropped my backpack on the laundry room floor and went back outside to the barn where I grabbed a pickaxe and a spade. There, in the middle of our little back yard overgrown with thigh-high weeds I began to dig. Claudia stood at the door, out of the driving rain, and called to me.
“What are you doing? Rick, what are you doing? Is anything wrong?”
I just kept shoveling, without even looking up, till I’d dug a hole about three feet in diameter and three feet deep. Then I went back inside, soaking wet and shivering, and gathered up every textbook I’d ever bought for a lit class, as well as a half dozen notebooks I’d filled. With both arms full I went back out into the rain and buried every bit of physical evidence that I’d been enrolled in a Masters’ of Arts Program in English and American Literature.
Claudia, my wife of less than a year, and I sat up until 1:00 a.m. talking about the decision I’d made. A decision that I’d made completely on my own, one that we both knew would have far-reaching implications for the rest of our life together. I explained as best I could and Claudia accepted completely the choice I’d made. In the years that followed our only regret was that I hadn’t taken the textbooks back to Robert’s Book Store and gotten at least a little of the money back we’d spent on them.
So, what was it that I said to my wife that night? What were the reasons I gave for suddenly and without warning turning my back on everything I’d worked so hard to achieve…not to mention turning my back on the always true-blue support she’d given through it all? In all honesty, I don’t remember much at all about our talk that night, except that it left us feeling okay, even optimistic in a strange sort of way, about our future. But if I tried guessing I think I could probably come close. I’d have told her that, although it was a little esoteric…okay, A LOT esoteric…Dr. Pepper’s dissertation topic really wasn’t that different from a lot of the scholarly writings I’d read, and even on occasion, that I’d written, in the past three years. And I’d have tried to convince her that my violent reaction in class that night really had nothing to do with losing respect for my professor, or for my classmates who sat enraptured by Dr. P’s lecture. Nor had I lost respect for all of the other professors who’d given their time and wonderful store of knowledge and their sincere encouragement to me. Hell, I wasn’t even angry at myself for hanging on for so long to the dream of teaching one day. It was just that…a dream; not a dream as in goal. The other kind of dream, the idealized world you construct in deep sleep and through which you wander in half conscious exploration. That’s how I’d spent the past three years, thoroughly engaged in and enjoying the process without buying into or, really, without even truly thinking about the outcome. All it took to bring me out of my yawning slumber was a scholarly treatise on why, even in Elizabethan England, breakfast was the most important meal of the day.
I looped the twine vertically around the bundle of typewritten pages, then horizontally and finished it off with the simple bowknot, which has always been my favorite of all the knots. Replacing the packet in the file drawer where I’d found it I wondered when my master works of literary criticism would be marveled at again. Maybe in another forty years? More likely they’d be taken, along with most everything else in the barn that couldn’t be sold, to the county’s landfill in East Sonora. I flipped off the light and as I headed back down to the house I thought of the grave I’d dug on that rainy Wednesday night. As it turned out, there’s probably no better way I could have spent those three years of my life. Putting that much time into writing about good writing… Hemingway and Vonnegut, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Lewis and Fitzgerald…and of course Shakespeare…how could you not learn how to turn a good phrase?