Osler's Razor

For reasons having mostly to do with Bill and Jane Smith, I went to college far away from home, in the midst of a very different culture.  I arrived at William and Mary with a suitcase in one hand and a portable typewriter in the other, having flown in from Detroit.  A cab dropped me off in front of Dupont Hall after dark, and after registration had closed.  Eventually, I found someone to give me a key, and found my room.  That's when I also found my roommate, John Donohue.

He was as much of an insider as I was an outsider.  He'd gone to a big high school in Northern Virginia, W.T. Woodson.  Because it was a good school, and William and Mary a state college that has to take at least 65% Virginia residents, there were a lot of people there from his class.  John was popular, the kind of people that others called out to as you walked across campus, new as we were to Williamsburg.  I spent those first weeks in his shadow, but that was a good place to be because he was generous and welcoming.  I got to know and love the school in part because of his kindness.

Unlike me, he already had an academic passion.  He loved classic languages and literature, and was a champion at Certamen, a kind of high-school quiz bowl in Latin.  He was a goofy normal guy, who would lapse into Latin phrases at any moment, a quirk that was both charming and kind of intimidating.

We remained friends through college, and there were a fair number of misadventures, many of them late at night deep within Colonial Williamsburg.   He was good that way-- the kind of guy who had ideas, fun ideas, that weren't too dangerous.  More than once, this combination of Latin scholar/mischievousness struck me as an ideal character for a TV show; he would have fit right in with the gang on Scooby Doo.

Then I went back to Detroit, and then off to law school, and we lost touch.

The year I graduated from law school, I stumbled across the January, 1990 edition of Reader's Digest, and found the story "The Unforgettable Maureen O'Donnell," by John Donohue.  It was John's account of the Latin teacher who had nurtured his passion and whose program he had taken over.   Reading it made my heart leap-- it was the perfect outcome for the guy I knew, the one who both loved the classics and was still about 22% 16-year-old boy.   I wrote to him; he wrote back.  We kept in touch in that too-loose way that guys do, a strand easily dropped.

This past Thursday night, I was watching IPLawGuy barbecue some chicken in his back yard (apparently, his recipe is to cook it at 170 degrees until the bird hits 160, which takes about 9 hours but leaves you with some great chicken).  It was a warm-but-not-hot clear-sky dusk in Northern Virginia, the Platonic ideal of a late spring evening.   I had spent the day working hard on clemency stuff in DC (there is quite a bit of that right now), and it was a perfect end to that frenzy of activity.  Sitting there, I realized that we weren't far from where John had grown up.

Maybe, too, William and Mary had been on my mind.  I was in a conference room earlier that day, furiously making notes before giving a short presentation to about 100 representatives of advocacy groups and an advisor to President Obama, when I felt strong hands on my shoulders from behind me.  Her voice said "you know who this is," and I did.  I did not need to stand or turn; I knew that it was Dr. Joanne Braxton, and it was.  There is sometimes that bond with those who have taught you.

With all of this, John kept coming back to me.  When I was back in Minneapolis on Friday, I looked to see what John was up to; we are friends on Facebook, so that is easy to do.  What I learned was that he died earlier this year of cancer.  He left behind a wife, two children, thousands of students, and a eulogy he wrote in the too-short time between his diagnosis and his death.

He slipped away when I wasn't looking, and there is something deeply sad about that.

There has been a torrent of rain here in Minnesota, and the creek by my house is raging-- it is now a river.  It spills over the banks, wipes out gardens, and sounds like power.  It is not the gentle stone-smoother behind the church anymore.

That's what happens here sometimes, in the Spring.  The water builds up, moves fast, demands its own path as it courses around you and you must struggle to keep up.  You lose sight of things, you're distracted, and then it happens-- someone has slipped under, and you did not notice.