Surprises Yet Again!

 Well, I should not have been surprised by this surprise.

My birthday morning at the Sylvia Beach Hotel

A few of years before his death I made a couple of collections of our letters and cards and put them in saved cookie tins.  I kept the tins near Will’s daytime chair so that he could look through them. The tins got moved around after his death and found a final spot downstairs. I hadn’t looked into them since I made them.  A few days ago I opened one of these tins, expecting to find a stack of cards from myself to Will.  And yes, there were a few cards from me. But there were also a few other things mixed in, including an unsigned note from a long-ago person I don’t know, written in a thin, right-leaning script.

The issue at hand was whether Will’s work at the University of Chicago was the equivalent of a DA at Idaho State University. As Will spoke of it, he’d been unceremoniously given an increased teaching load at some point, perhaps when the college became a university, simply because he didn’t have a doctorate. As he told the story; the only other person to be so targeted was one of the few female professors, also hired before change from four year. (I always appreciated this part of the story, as it illustrated once again how he identified with women.)   This note seems to be the last page of a set of responses to six or seven questions. 

“In conclusion I might note that I have done a fairly careful analysis of Professor Huck’s transcript from Chicago and I believe a strong case can be made for the claim that Huck’s graduate work there is equivalent to a D.A.  In this case the A.M. in Religion and Art would be the primary degree.The work done towards the D.B would be taken as an interdisciplinary component.The supervised fieldwork would be analogous to the teaching component.  I would be pleased to present this case but believe it is best preserved until the committee has the interaction sought in the questions posed above.”

Yes, dear readers, it ends on a question that makes me question.  With whom was the committee seeking to interact? Someone special from the University of Chicago? One of the stars from whom Will took classes?

How and when Will found his keepsake and then slipped it into this box is beyond my knowing. But how fitting for this to pop up when I was yearning so for him - this physical reminder of one of his core stories: how he fought the academic dragon and won. 

And how nice for the heavens to play with me again.