Hawthorn Hill Journal by Richard deRosa

Farewell, and Thanks, Bill

It is far too easy to become inured to daily headlines announcing the deaths of scores of people somewhere in the world, or of drive-by shootings here in these United States. Just think about it. What, for instance, does it really mean when just one person is killed? That one person might have been a child, a mother, a grandmother, a father, a brother—well, you get the point. Just think of the consequences of that death. Relatives have lost a loved one, friends have lost someone who added incalculable meaning to their lives, communities have lost someone who is an integral part of their communal identity. And the beat goes on. Each death is significant. We all die eventually, one would hope after living a long and full life. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the deaths we read about every day are the result of indiscriminate bombing, petty grievances, religious zealotry, grabs for power and ideologies that fuel countless atrocities. Sadly, far too many innocent people are victims of these darker animations of the human spirit.

In this light, I want to share some thoughts with you about my reactions to just one death. One not the result of any of these deplorable manifestations of humankind’s propensity to self-destruction. Like you, I get many e-mails every day. I enjoy deleting them more than I do reading them. But every so often one catches one’s eye. And that was the case a few days ago when I was informed that my much admired and beloved high school English teacher, Bill Carhart, had passed away.

When several of us got together in advance of our 50th reunion, one task was to nominate one teacher for special acknowledgement. We selected two people and my job was to write Bill a letter inviting him to the reunion. He had retired to Maine, doing those things he loved to do: read, of course, but also to fly fish, cross-country ski, and do some antiquing, which it appears he had become quite expert in. His response to my letter was a polite thank you, but no. Undaunted, I wrote back, but this time I enclosed a copy of the essay I had written about him that had appeared in “The Freeman’s Journal” some years prior and in my book, “Hawthorn Hill Journal.” That did it. He wrote back that he would come, admittedly encouraged by his wife, who later confided to me that when he read the second letter and the essay, he teared up. Suffice it to say that our reunion after all those years was very, very special.

I remember the first time he entered the classroom, clad in khakis, tweed jacket and scotch plaid tie, pretty much his standard uniform. He then perched cross-legged on his desk, looked at us quizzically and said, “Gentlemen, take out a piece of paper.” He then gave us a writing assignment, to be completed in class, which he took home to scrutinize. Suffice it to say, when he came back in a few days with the graded papers, he held them in his hand, looked us over from his perch and informed us that we all needed to learn to write. And write we did, a lot. That included the much dreaded term paper, an in-depth study of an American author of our choice. I chose Melville, little realizing what I was getting into. I learned a very valuable lesson under Bill’s tutelage: The best writing is clear, concise and to the point. I’ll never forget my grade on a paper subsequently, one decorated at the end with a bright red shovel. I realized that when adding new vocabulary words to one’s repertoire, showing them off in a piece of writing where they have no natural place is, well, a very bad idea. Misplaced hubris.

My lifelong relationship with Thoreau, Emerson, Robert Frost and a host of notable American authors and poets stems from those days in Bill’s classroom and on many of the walks that we would take, especially on warm, sunny days. His was an expansive grasp of American literature, as well as history. More often than not our discussions were both rooted in a reading of the text and the historical context within which they were created. Bill’s methods were often zany, unpredictable—he never had to worry about losing our attention. He dazzled us with his sense of humor, his keen intellect and, most of all, his love of literature. He was an iconoclast in the best sense of the word.

Now, many years later, I read and reread Thoreau and Emerson and Frost and have shared my love of those writers with my own students over the course of 30-plus years. I am convinced that I was a better teacher because of Bill Carhart. Not because I have consciously copied his style, but because he ignited a flame within me that has sustained me all these years. His passing has saddened me, but the gift of having him as my teacher—well, that is a gift I will always be grateful for. Thanks, Bill.

Dick deRosa’s Hawthorn Hill essays have appeared in “The Freeman’s Journal” since 1998. A collection, “Hawthorn Hill Journal: Selected Essays,” was published in 2012. He is a retired English teacher.