Farewell to a good friend

I said good-bye to my old professor friend Ted today. His devoted niece Celeste arranged a phone call at his bedside at the hospital where he’s been under Hospice care for a few days. He raised his eyebrows to acknowledge my call and a tear rolled down his face, Celeste said.

I met Ted in the 60′s at the English Institute at the University of Hawaii. I was a student in his linguistics class . “You!” he pointed at me in class. “Speaking of value systems, it’s quite obvious where your values are. Why, even the design of your dress is like the wrapping paper of Liberty House.” ( The Macy’s of today.) I never wore that spaghetti strapped dress to class again. Ted, of course, didn’t know then, who he was dealing with that day.

I raised my hand before he could start his class a few weeks later. “So,” I asked, “Was there a sale at the Sears basement this past weekend?”  He was wearing a new aloha shirt. We sparred for the next six weeks.

One day Ted stood nervously as he announced that his guru master teacher James Sledd, the renown linguist would be visiting our class the following day. He warned us, ” I suggest you refrain from exposing your ignorance by questioning this man. Just listen to him.”

When Mr. Sledd commented on dialects and how dialect speakers do not want to change and therefore, we must not even think of tampering people’s dialects, I raised  my hand and said, “”Mr. Sledd, I disagree with you.” Ted was behind him, motioning me to shut up. “I grew up speaking Pidgin,” I continued, “and at age 6 when I discovered Pidgin was not the standard English found in books or  how others spoke, I was determined to lose my dialect.”

He came toward me and said, “Young lady, you interest me.” I gave the smuggest look  I could muster to  Ted.

On the last day of  class, after the finals, he asked to see me outside. He bent over and told me to look at the label on his new aloha shirt. I saw a Liberty House label.

Twenty five years later, I saw Ted again, in the audience during a conference on writing. My lecture was on Children as Authors project on which I was basing my entire curriculum in my classes.

Ted came to me and said, “The Dept of Educ. ought to put you in a van and take you to every school in the state.”

“You don’t remember me, do you? Summer of 63?”

He pointed his finger at me once again and said, “Liberty House.” That week, he sent me a check for a hundred dollars with a note: Use this for the kids and writing, not at Liberty House.”

And we became pen pals. He never had a computer after he gave his first away to a young student whose story of needing a computer appeared in the local newspaper. Ted unplugged his and took it to him. He once bought a bicycle for a student who was taking a bus to his job while attending college.

In one of his letters, he asked if I knew he was gay.
“OF course,” I wrote back. “When you didn’t ask me out that summer in 63, I knew you were gay because I knew you weren’t married and any man who doesn’t ask me out must be gay.”

Ted lived with dignity. He was concerned that being gay would rob him of his dignity until the day he decided that he needed to write a letter to the editor on the gay issue. And he did and drew a breath of relief when nothing changed in his relationships with his neighbors.

We both had season tickets to the opera in Hawaii when I lived there; he knew more about opera than I did.

Ted was also courageous in how he lived alone and became a cancer survivor. I would have died from the descriptions he sent about what chemo therapy did to him.

We playfully sparred and bantered  a lot, laughed a lot, and we both knew beneath it all was a true friendship. I learned to be generous in helping others  because this is what Ted did. More than anything else, I could do no wrong in his eyes.   He told everyone he met that I was a genius and I should become the next Poet Laureate. In later years, he would recognize me or my name through the word Poet. And I shamelessly greeted him with “This is the genius calling.”

I saw him a few months ago at his nursing facility. Early set dementia was beginning to fog part of our conversations. I kissed him before I left and asked, “When was the last time a beautiful woman kissed you?”

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes and slowly said,” I’m still waiting.” I punched him  playfully and left.

About five hours after my phone call to Ted today, his niece Celeste called to say Ted left us.

I will miss him, Ted Plaister.

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