Diane and I inhaled the 10-episode third season of Hallmark’s The Way Home over the course of a few days this week. It’s a soft-scrubbed, multilayered time travel series that occasionally creaks across the floorboards with certain storylines, yet is enjoyable thanks to the (mostly) likable characters and the actors who play them.
Thanks to it and the Peter Case-Sid Griffin concert we attended, I’ve found myself skating across the pond of time this week a little more often than my norm. Forty years ago is a lifetime for some, I know, but seems like yesterday to others—including, on occasion, me. I turned 20 midway through 1985 and, that autumn, swapped my commuter college for the Penn State mothership, where I found myself in classrooms with 25-or-so other English majors. (Over the semesters, that number whittled down to 10 to 15.) Subjects focused on classic and modern literature, plus how-tos on writing non-fiction, fiction and poetry. It was a blast.
I’ve been lucky to have learned from many wonderful teachers through the decades and the misfortune to only experience a few bad apples. The worst of the latter: In fourth grade, aka the early 1970s, a teacher threw me against a wall and huffed in my face that he’d beat me for my perceived insolence. Of the former: There are, truly, too many to list, with each and every one influencing me for the better. The second paragraph to this short essay hopefully foreshadows where my memories are taking me today, however: a college professor.
Specifically: Dr. John Haag, a jean-clad, white-haired poet who served in the Merchant Marine during World War II and the Navy during the Korean conflict. One result, as he told me, was that when he finally attended college—at the University of Washington in Seattle—he’d learned something many of his fresh-faced classmates hadn’t: First do your work, then drink your beer! He was a colorful character who enunciated the intricacies of the human condition both in print and conversation. In the classroom, his mantra was a simple one: “Don’t state, create!” During office hours, when I often found myself sitting adjacent to his desk, he elaborated by going in-depth into the written word—his, mine, and many of the modern classics. I spun folk records on the student-run radio station, so we also bonded over a shared love of music, which included Van Morrison’s ethereal albums of the early and mid-1980s.
The most important lesson he taught me was to think beyond the box, to take a beat and let a thought linger, to give it a chance to breathe. I tended, back then, to tumble greeting-card sentiments onto the page via sentences that employed the circular logic of many song lyrics; i.e. they ended where they began. He showed, via penciled scrawls excising half my lines, that vague reasoning needs specific seasoning and, as importantly, most rhymes need time to jell. I think of him every time I write.
The Old Grey Cat 
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