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Irving Rimer among the young at the University of North Carolina. My
father and I are sitting in Person Recital Hall at the University of North
Carolina, listening to a discussion of the final scene of Monteverdi's ''Orfeo,''
part of the class ''Opera as Drama.'' The professor, Anne MacNeil, has
just shown a video in which Orfeo goes to the underworld to bring Euridice
back to earth. The opera, Professor MacNeil tells the class, is about
adolescence and coming of age. We
are in the front row. My father, Irving Rimer, is taking notes. He is 81.
The seats around him are occupied by undergraduates more than 60 years his
junior. Classes like this one have become the focus of his retirement
years, and I am along on this day for the experience. In Person Hall, he
conveys the same seriousness and respect for education that he did as a
younger man, when he was putting my two sisters and me through college.
During our visits, he talks eagerly about what he is studying, and his
course books are stacked on the table beside his favorite chair.
Professor
MacNeil mentions that the coming exam will include questions on ''Orfeo.''
My father, alone among the students, looks utterly unconcerned. While he
faithfully does the reading and rarely misses a class, he skips out on the
exams. He does not write papers, either. He is auditing ''Opera as
Drama,'' and so he will not get a grade. From elementary school through
college and graduate school, my father worried about grades.
''I
was out to get all A's,'' he says.
As
the son of a Lithuanian immigrant tailor, excelling at school was his
ticket to upward mobility. He earned an undergraduate degree from the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in sociology, and a master's in social
work administration from the University of Chicago. Now he can pursue pure
learning, simply for the joy of it.
He
has audited more than 40 classes in 10 years: Southern writers, religion
and Southern culture, history of Russia, 20th-century poetry, medicine and
anthropology, philosophy and art, modern art, literature of atrocities,
Islam, American Indian and African-American history, jazz, the Beatles,
James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.
As
a 20-year-old at the University of Michigan, he could not get through
''Ulysses.'' A few years ago, though, he was ready. ''I'm more patient,''
my father says. ''And I have more time.''
For
35 years he commuted from Levittown, Pa., to his job at the American
Cancer Society in New York City, where he retired as vice president for
public information. He left the house at 7 a.m., returning home at 7 p.m.
-- when the trains were on time. He loved the two-hour commute: it was
time to read. He also loved his work, and he would have preferred to have
kept at it. Pastimes like tennis and traveling and sailing were never
going to be enough to make a life for my father.
One
thing that drew my parents to Fearrington Village, their retirement
community outside Chapel Hill, was the University of North Carolina's
policy of
My
father -- and mother, too -- prefer to be in classes with the young people
at U.N.C. My father says he likes hearing the younger generation talk
about T.S. Eliot and Yeats -- and Andy Warhol and the Beatles. He wants to
hear their interpretation of events he lived through, as well as their
thoughts about the changing world.
He
has a strict rule: Whatever the subject, even if it is, say, the Great
Depression, which he lived through, or World War II, which he served in as
an Army medic during the Allied invasion of Germany, he speaks up only
when there are no student hands up. ''They're the ones paying for the
course and getting marked for participation,'' he says. His other rules:
Never be late (at his insistence, we are half an hour early for ''Opera as
Drama''). And no eating or drinking in class. It is disrespectful to the
professor. My sister Elizabeth, who likes to attend classes with my father
when she is visiting, remembers one hot day during the summer session when
she grabbed a Diet Coke on campus. ''He told me,
horrified, that I absolutely could not drink it in class,'' she remembers.
''Of course, the minute the kids assembled for the class, there was a full
chorus of popping soda cans.'' My father, who
grew up in Salem, Mass., first went to Bowdoin College, two hours north in
Brunswick, Me. Working long hours in his tailor shop, my grandfather
somehow managed to scrape together the tuition. As my father
tells it, Bowdoin's required three years of classical Greek (or Latin) did
him in. The first year he sailed through Greek. But the second year, the
professor raced through ''The Iliad'' -- in Greek, of course. Every day my
father fell farther behind. ''Homer was
destroying me,'' he says. He was used to A's. Suddenly he was getting C's.
A friend from Salem, meanwhile, was writing him letters about how great
the University of Michigan was, and it didn't have a Greek requirement. My
father graduated from Ann Arbor in 1943 and went straight into the Army,
and on to Germany. Back home, with a Silver Star, he went to graduate
school on the G.I. Bill. One of his
favorite classes at the University of North Carolina was the Greek
classics. For the first time he read ''The Iliad'' and ''The Odyssey'' --
in English. In Person Hall,
Professor MacNeil is explaining that the higher the voices, the more
innocent the characters. My father tells me later that she is expanding
his appreciation of the art form. ''I thought opera
was just singing and music,'' he says. He and my mother are planning a
trip to New York. They have tickets to ''La Boheme.'' Professor MacNeil
has made my father promise he will report to the class on the opera. My father has
left his cane (he prefers to call it a walking stick) against the wall
beside the door of the classroom. Four years ago he had a minor stroke. He
was lucky: there was no cognitive and no major physical damage. But his
life was altered. He was left with a pacemaker and uncertain balance.
Because of the risk of falling, tennis was out. A physical therapist asked
him what his goal was. He wanted to be able to walk to classes. When ''Opera as
Drama'' finishes for the day, my father thanks Professor MacNeil for her
fine class. He puts his spiral notebook and pen in his black canvas bag
and collects his cane. A student holds the door for him. A couple of
others say goodbye. As the hordes of young people advance across the
campus, my father makes his way carefully to his next class, ''History of
Science.'' ''The professor
is great,'' he tells me. ''We've been discussing Mary Shelley's
'Frankenstein.' We've learned that Mary Shelley was very much aware of the
developments taking place in chemistry in Europe at the time, and she was
putting much of her scientific knowledge to work in the book.'' My father never
held his trouble with classical Greek against Bowdoin, and all these years
later, he still quotes William DeWitt Hyde, Bowdoin's turn-of-the-century
president, in his ''Offer of the College'': ''To be at home in all lands
and all ages'' is the mark of an educated man. Here in this land
of young people, my father is at home, still deepening his education. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
