Mr. Hamm
Inspired by reading 2fruition 's tribute to Tony, a British guy who was a very positive influence on him as a teen, I wanted to try and tack down my own memory of Eugene Hamm.
He came to teach in the junior high where my dad was a principal when I was about 15. He taught honors English and math as well as remedial English. I never had a class with him since I was older than the 8th graders he taught. He wore wrinkled sweater vests, mismatched tweed jackets, corded and loose pants, pointy glasses, and brogans. He had a wooden cane he always carried with him but didn't need it -- he was about 35 years old at the time. His hair was longish and slicked back -- comb and water constantly -- and had the fullest beard I had ever seen outside of late 19th-century photographs. He drove a beat-up yellow pick-up, when he had to, but he hated to drive.
He once asked me what I liked to read. I told him: Stephen King and T.S. Eliot. He approved of Eliot and asked me solicitous and fair questions about King. He engaged me in serious conversations about literature and imparted to me that such discussions -- and writing and reading -- were important. He was refreshingly not a snob and talked to me as a peer.
I got to where, when I was waiting on my dad to finish work, I'd go to his classroom after school and talk to him most days. Eventually, he invited me to his house. It was an old weather-beaten farmhouse his family had owned and let fall into disarray. He didn't really fix it up any, just moved right in and set up house. There were books and papers stacked everywhere. A jazz station out of Memphis played on a dinky radio in a corner. His socks hung drying over the open doors. The place smelled like sweat and smoke and paper.
He offered me coffee. When he brought it to me, he dropped a sprig of fresh mint in it and asked me if I wanted whiskey in it. I said sure, a little taken aback, since my family was a fundamentalist crowd and he knew that and since I was under age. He said I'd need to learn to drink whiskey if I wanted to dirty my hands in the belles lettres (pronounced purposely incorrectly) and went ahead and poured some in, and we went out to sit on his porch and gab, while he drank his own coffee and smoked his pipe.
I visited periodically from then on out. When I was a senior, I was writing a poem for a scholarship, a poem about Tennessee poets. He drove me to Sewanee to meet the editor of the Sewanee Review (more pipes, more tweed, a huge labrador retriever) and then to meet another friend of his who was a poet. On the way back, my jaws rattled as bad as his truck did as I talked about literature up one side of the cab and down the other.
I thought he might have been gay. He was single and never spoke of relationships with women at all. He had a picture of his older brother, who looked like Walt Whitman and lived in San Francisco. He never let on, though, in any other way. He was a kindly mentor. He was a model, for me, of the rural intellectual, of a man who maintained a lively mind, an artistic bent, eccentricity, at the same time he was very much at home, part of, a community of roughneck farmers, soured ministers, and swaggering coaches. He was a live anachronism, and he helped form what I wanted to be and treated it with sincere respect, allowed me to believe that is possible to live differently, according to your ideals and desires, and still operate with understanding and decency in a world that might not return in kind.
Still now, to him, Mr. Hamm, a tipped hat and a gripping hand of thanks ... .