WHOSE MEMORIAM, WHEN?
May 2016. Linkedin Message string:
FROM KATHRIN DAY LASSILA: Dear Andy, Greetings from across the ages! I looked at your Wikipedia page and saw you've become an independent-bookstore champion (and no doubt an independent bookstore champion). How are you? I was thinking of you this weekend at our class reunion... All best, Kathrin
FROM ANDY: Hi Kathrin, I know—I wanted to go to the reunion but once again I failed to put it together. I did manage to get to the 20th—way back in 2001—which is a complicated and wonderful memory. But—hello! Of course I have read many of your editorial essays over the years—so perhaps I have felt closer to you than you realized. (I need to get going—will write again. Best, Andy)
FROM KATHRIN: It's great to hear from you. Are you in NYC, as LinkedIn says? Maybe we could get together for coffee or lunch sometime? I make it to NYC every now and again. It would be really terrific to see you. And now, a possibly unsettling story, and please forgive my relating it: the proximate cause for my writing was that Yale had somehow included you on our class’s “In Memoriam” list. I said, my God, no way !!!—and I told everyone so at the memorial service. On the plus side: your being alive caused a moment of joy and relief in all the sorrow. I promised them I'd confirm your continued presence among us—so, if you get any very happy emails shortly, this is why!
FROM ANDY: Wait—I missed the opportunity to attend my own funeral! Damn! I knew I should have tried harder to get there. You are so sweet to let me know this delightful tidbit. I did earn an obituary in 1996 when my bookstore in Chicago went under—in Entrepreneur Magazine (they actually have or had an obits column profiling business failures). I am running Bank Street Bookstore, near Columbia. Yes, I'm around all the time. I had lunch with Marina Sheriff last year—she shops at the store sometimes.
FROM ANDY: Looking at this string again I realize the callousness of my response. I'm sorry for the loss of our friends.
FROM ANDY: I had a Facebook conversation with Nancy Lee—she sent me a poem referring to Andy Lent. Do you think my name was substituted for his?
FROM KATHRIN: Not callous at all! At the memorial gathering, we laughed and cried alternately, grieving but also remembering good times. (I told everyone Win-jing Cheng's theory that one isn't drunk if one can still recite the entire quadratic formula, and we all had a belly laugh.) I thought what you said about missing the chance to hear your own funeral was hilarious.
FROM ANDY: Well anyway now I guess I better show up at the 40th as a vampire.
FROM KATHRIN: Or write on your namecard “Lazarus Laties.” I don't know how the list was put together, but Lauri Semarne thinks she caused the mistake by getting your name mixed up with Andy Lent’s. I guess she asked them to add your name. But fortunately Andy Lent’s name was on the list, and at the memorial gathering we remembered him and his heroism.
FROM ANDY: I like that. Lazarus Laties. When my daughter was in utero I spent a little while advocating for the name Mercedes Lotus Laties (which we did not use...) I saw Nancy Lee on your Facebook friends page, and friended her, and she immediately responded that she'd included me in a poem she'd written in January—and that poem was about Andy Lent. What a cascade of coincidences.
FROM ANDY: Wow Nancy is in serious trouble. I finally read her Facebook page. So horrible. And her mom just died a few days ago.
FROM KATHRIN: Yes awful, awful, and beyond awful. I'd pray, if I weren't so furious at God. (And I'm an agnostic, but it doesn't seem to enter in.)
***
Posted by Andy, seven years later, on the Class of 1981 Facebook page, shortly after Nancy Lee passed away from cancer:
Reposting Nancy Lee’s remarkable poem about our freshman year:
Bingham Hall
after Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool," with thanks to Terrance Hayes
Packed powder squeaks cold under boot heels as we
enter the warm hollow of light. Our first real
freshman snow. Notes of shakuhachi breathy and cool
drift down around our shoulders and heads. We
wonder who is up on the tower roof. Inside, the rugby team left
a standing pool of stale beer with someone's school
tie drowning in it. To cross the rotunda we
splash through ankle-deep. Arching over our heads lurk
gargoyles, stone faces gaunt and grey from staying up late
watching us pull all-nighters. Desks chained to walls, if only we
would ascend the winding spiral we would strike
stars, drink wilder air, touch music, gaze straight
and clear. But if we're not in competition, how can we
know if we have won? So of arms and the man we sing,
because the Venus de Milo hasn't got any, you pogue. Our sin
is sipping from Town & Country while perusing cans of Tab. We
worship the translucent, the high-arched, J. Press, and thin
gold glasses. Lime Jell-O cubes that are half gin
scorch and wiggle on the way down. We
crank the Dead into the courtyard but exile jazz
and plan to work at each others’ fathers’ firms from June
to August. But first, spring break in the Bermoothes. We
never think that a year from now, one of us will die.
We never think that immortality ends so soon.
(c) 2016 Nancy Lee
Now here is some explanation from Nancy:
"This poem is an acrostic -- if you read just the word at the end of each line, you get the poem "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. The form was invented by Terrance Hayes."
A bit further explanation: the classmate who died our sophomore year was Andy Lent. The shakuhachi player on the tower roof was me, Andy Laties. What I did not remind Nancy in 2016, when she showed me this poem, was that in fact I'd played both saxophone and flute on the tower roof that year of 1977, but not shakuhachi. She'd gotten mixed up about this. Four years later, when I lived in Tokyo, she had visited me (1981)—I had played shakuhachi for her at that time, in Tokyo (where I was studying the instrument, for the first time). She herself went onward to Korea and spent seven months there. Much later, when she wrote this poem in 2016, she transposed my shakuhachi-playing backward in time to 1977.
—I felt honored that she'd included me in her poem.
Nancy Lee, Summer 2023
