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Last fall, I was a TA for a freshman honors seminar called Texts & Critics. Along with a faculty fellow, I co-taught the class in which we read classics, poetry, and international literature and discussed applications of these works to our modern concept of knowledge. This was one of my favorite classes. I grew to love every one of my students and my co-fellow, a great professor and grand thinker named Tom Herbeck.
Today I found out that Tom passed away last month after a brief but brave battle with a brain tumor. His obituary reflects on his life as a father and a teacher in an incredibly poignant way.
Tom was the one who inspired me to read Borges. Tom was an example to me of how to teach without preaching. Tom was genuinely concerned with each and every student and cared more about their individual growth than about the bureaucracy and cold GPA sensibillities of the university system.
I also discovered today, five minutes after this first news, that a good friend of mine is engaged to be married. She's happy, she's glowing, and she's the embodiment of promise of the new generation. Crystal is mature and smart and graduated with an honors degree in chemical engineering before any of the rest of her peers had even adjusted to a truly academic university life. She's everything I admire in a friend, and one of my role models. And she's now taking the next step into the big web of life.
So here's to life - and here's to death. And here's to life. Here's a remembrance to the babies that aren't yet born and a salute to those we've learned from that have moved on.
Here's to my two heroes of the day - Tom and Crystal.
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Wow. News of death and marriage in 5 minutes? How overwhelming. You should write a poem, or paint or express it in art somehow, how your joy and sorrow blended. . . hmmm...bittersweet is too bland a phrase. . .antinomic or antinomie comes close.
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