Eng. 251
before I took
Eng. 250
, the first course in the survey of American lit. You know -- the fucking Puritans, and those god-awful American Romantics. I just wanted to get to the good stuff right away, and somehow getting to the good stuff meant going through Dave Heard -- one of a handful of the University's resident experts on Modern American Studies.
In the end, I had no idea how good the good stuff was going to be. Dave Heard taught me that -- and irony of ironies -- the good stuff had nothing to do with American literature!
Not that he wasn't a great professor, he was. He knew his shit, and more than that, he made learning that shit really interesting, not just to me and those other overachievers, but to pretty much everyone. There was no doubt that he was one of the most highly regarded professors on campus.
But he was more than that. He was just a good man, a really sweet guy, who genuinely cared about his students' learning and, maybe even more importantly, their futures. He must have said it about a hundred different times in about a hundred different ways in the three courses I ended up taking from him, but his goal was that each of his students would learn what he had spent a lifetime absorbing and would then surpass him. I remember the time that he made that point most abundantly clear when he suggested that he would know he had done his job and done it well when one of his students took that job away from him.
How could you not love that approach? Instead of being fastidious about safeguarding the "Holy Grail," the secretive body of knowledge that each professor had amassed over a lifetime, using it in the most calculated manner possible to make students feel inferior so as not to feel threatened by them -- a skill mastered by almost every other tenured professor at the university -- Dave Heard
wanted
his students to threaten him, to challenge him, to try to prove him an idiot.
None of them ever did because he was brilliant, but I think he was really serious about challenging us to do so, and he really wanted the students, not him, to end up the winners. I guess in the end, that's the plot of the story I'm about to tell.
So that first morning, when he came over to me to introduce himself and shake my timid hand, I didn't know what to make of him. It wasn't like he was the most gorgeous man I'd ever seen before -- not that there wasn't something distinctly attractive about him -- but it was his mind, his personality, and his style that eventually won me over, and those thing took a little time to understand and appreciate.
I guess I did notice the external package right away on that first day. He was wearing these retro glasses that looked like spectacles that Arthur Miller might have sported when he was romancing Marilyn Monroe, and his thick head of somewhat long, unruly hair and his closely cropped beard were that wonderfully natural mix of salt and pepper that make older men so sexy looking.
I guess I was probably always susceptible to the charms of an older man, but I didn't know it at the time. I had him pegged for about 45 years old, so I was more than surprised when I got to know him better and discovered that he was fifteen years older than that at the time. I was shocked -- he sure as hell didn't look 60, nor did he act it.
After that, I guess the next thing that really caught my attention were his clothes. He was just so natural -- the pure, unadulterated denunciation of pretentiousness. It didn't matter where he was, he was always clad in casual garb, but not too casual, because that too can come off as contrived and artificial. You could tell that Dave Heard didn't put on airs, either trying to dress up or dress down to suit a particular occasion.
I saw him at fundraising events for the university where every male in the room, except him, was wearing a tuxedo; at student/faculty mixers, where some of the male professors tried to fool everyone into thinking that they were the hippest 50 or 60 year-olds this side of Jeff Bridges; in class, where they all seemed hell-bent on establishing their academic bona fides through their wardrobes; or at State Street clubs or restaurants on the weekends, where most of the older guys tried hard to look like they were still in graduate school.
But that wasn't Dave Heard. He just seemed oblivious to fashion, and in so doing, I thought him the most fashionable man I'd ever seen.
Sometimes he wore jeans or some other type of laid-back pants or trousers that were, once and awhile, torn or ripped, though you could tell they had earned their scars naturally -- Dr. Heard would have recoiled at the idea of paying an extra $10 for every fake tear built into a pair of designer denim.
Then, tucked into, or occasionally dangling around, the waistband of those pants, he usually wore a simple, patterned dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, so that he looked like he was ready to get to work. And then finally, his feet would be clad in anything from some casual oxfords or
Doc Martens
to a comfortable pair of
Vans
or
Sanuks
or some similar type of footwear
.
But it wasn't until I got to know him well -- started spending time with him -- that I really learned what made him tick, and that was when I really fell for him. Despite his age, he was into all sorts of hipster influences, without trying in the least to be a hipster himself.
He had this incredible collection of recorded music -- vinyl records, CDs, and digital downloads, and he listened to practically every musical genre that ever existed: from all different types of classical music to ragtime, big band, bebop, cool, and avant-garde jazz, to rhythm and blues, rock and roll, alternative, folk, country, hip hop, reggae, world music, and practically everything in between.
His taste in film, art, and literature was equally esoteric, eclectic, and eccentric without appearing to be affected, calculated, or manufactured in the least. And he was a collector. If it was art, and it was good, he bought it -- music, to be sure, but also films, paintings, and, of course, books -- everything from non-fiction and criticism to all kinds of other stuff: novels, collections of short stories, poetry, theater -- you name it, he bought it.
But it wasn't just his interests that set him apart. It was his whole lifestyle. For instance, there was his predilection for walking. He always walked, and I mean everywhere. I didn't learn that he actually owned an automobile until I was invited to his house one night several months after I first met him and found one parked in his garage.
In those first few months after I met him, I don't think he ever drove it. It seemed like the most superfluous possession a man like him could own, because he walked everywhere he went -- to the University of Wisconsin each morning and back home again each night, all across the massive UW campus during the day, and to restaurants and bars, anywhere from State Street to downtown and the Capitol square, or to the lakes -- Mendota or Monona.
There were plenty of professors who were into cycling or motorcycles, but I didn't know another one who got around Madison exclusively on the two feet he was born with. It didn't matter the weather -- sun, rain, snow or sleet. If you set up camp, at say, Bascom Hall or Camp Randall or any other landmark on campus on any given day of the year, the odds were you wouldn't have to wait too long before Dave Heard would trod by with his characteristic aggressive strides and penchant for leaning into each step. In short nothing would stay him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.
And then, there was his story. You couldn't help but be moved by it. He was a bachelor now, but not by choice -- actually, more accurately, a widower. The story quickly became part of his legend and lore.
Apparently, when he was in graduate school, he had met and fallen in love with a woman of uncommon beauty. I found out later that she was a scholar too. They had gotten married, had three children, and done all of the conventional things that couples did -- bought a stately home in Madison's historic district; introduced their children to a million sports, artistic undertakings, and activities of all kinds; guided them to adulthood and their own full, rich lives and academic pursuits; and then, in one stunningly sad and tragic event, they were all lost to him -- killed in a plane crash, when they were about to meet him at a vacation destination in the South Pacific somewhere. The authorities never found their bodies.
He had been attending a conference in the San Francisco Bay area and was scheduled to fly in to meet them when the conference ended, but some kind of mechanical failure had taken down their plane, and he didn't get the news until he landed in Fiji or someplace like it, and then had to suffer the horror of trying to find out what had happened to everyone he loved in a place that was supposed to be paradise, but had just turned into hell on earth.
That was when he was in his late 40s, and he had never remarried, because, the story went, he knew he couldn't ever replace his lost love. I learned all this through the UW grapevine, and now, that same rumor mill had it that he had had affairs with a female professor and a graduate student or two who reminded him of his wife, and, more than a decade after the tragedy, had helped, however ineffectually, to take some of his pain away.
I came to believe that I was the first undergraduate with whom he ever took up a relationship, but rather than Dave Heard using his position of power to cast me under his spell -- which is what everyone would have assumed had that ever gotten out -- he used our relationship instead to help
me
. I would never be where I am today without him.
But I'm pretty certain that I helped Dr. Heard too, and so this is a story of two people whose mutual love, respect, and caring for each other was both reciprocal and unconditional. And even though we eventually both married other people, we became the best of friends, inseparable confidantes, which I think is pretty incredible for former lovers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I guess back then he saw something in me, too, something appealing, though when I met him that first day in the Fall of 2006, I was, in my own opinion, a gangly, awkward teenager, a few months shy of her nineteenth birthday, who hadn't come into her own yet.
