Gremmels
For months, I've been trying to write a tribute to my mentor Jim Gremmels. I still don't think I have it right, but I think it's closer than it has ever been so far, and I think I'll send this version to his wife Ruth. I think part of the reason I am having trouble writing it is not only because there are so many memories, but also because he himself was such a great writer, so clear and to the point, and so poignant and funny. I can't ever hope to write as well as he did, so nothing I could write would ever be an adequate tribute. Still, here is what I have.
A Tribute to Gremmels
The first time I had a meal with Jim Gremmels, I was interviewing for the first of many versions of the job I have now at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He claimed to be retiring, and told me over cafeteria pizza that if I got the job, I would also get his office. By this point, he had asked me two questions, and two questions only: did I think I could live in this town, and did I really care about my students. I said yes to both, but really, I was just looking to get as far away from Phoenix as possible, and this seemed as good a place as any to land for a couple years. But I had been teaching long enough that I knew I meant the part about my students, though I had no idea until much later that there could be no comparison between my love for the young people in my classes, or anyone’s, and his.
He didn’t say much else during lunch—or at least, not much that I remember—but after that, he gave me a tour, which ended at his office. I had never seen an office so messy in my life. The floor was strewn with piles of files, random paper clips and slips of paper, and a thick layer of dirt. Large, open cupboards were overflowing with more files, more papers, and stacks of books. He didn’t apologize for the mess; he simply stepped over his piles while explaining, “Back before this was a college, it used to be the principal’s office for the ag school. That’s why there’s a button in the corner. He used to press this, see, and ring the bell.” He pushed his thumb against it, then turned to me and grinned. “But it no longer works, so I have no control over this place.”
I took the job, and arrived in the middle of summer, when most of my future colleagues and students were gone. And, while I’d hoped being in a small, quiet place would help me to center my hectic life for awhile, giving me time to read and write and think, moving into my new rented home and office had the opposite effect: I felt lonely. So, when I started moving into the office, it was good to have some signs of another human being in my midst—signs I quickly realized had been left for me on purpose.
He’d left a bulletin board with a poem tacked to it called “For the Children” by Gary Snyder. I could tell the poem had been printed on the old-time press he had proudly shown me during his tour. I didn’t think much of the poem at the time, but I realize now how prophetic it was, in a way, of my relationship with Gremmels. The first stanza reads:
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
I was starting my career, that steep climb on which I believed at the time this small college and office would be just a stepping stone—and he was ending his. Everything I would come to understand about who I was as a teacher, and a person—an understanding that would lead me, like him, to dedicate much of my life to this college on the prairie--would require fighting the facts of my life that, up to that point, had indicated I wasn’t going to be happy. I was going to learn how to fight the status quo, how to see the climb not so much as a way to get ahead but as a way to find a home, and Gremmels would play a big role in teaching me that.
When I opened the filing cabinet, I found a stack of books, mostly poetry by feminist and lesbian writers, in the top filing drawer. Apparently, he had already figured me out. There was a small piece of paper that looked as if it had been trampled over, no doubt a scrap he’d found on the floor when he was moving out. It said, simply “Thought you’d like these. –JG.”
I didn’t see him again until the first week of classes. “Did you find the books?” he asked me, appearing suddenly in my doorway. He wasn’t one for small talk or greetings—no “I’m glad you took the job” or “how has the adjustment been going?”
I looked up at him, startled. “Thanks!” I said.
“I thought you’d like them. They’re not on loan. Yours to keep.”
“Thanks,” I said again, and just as I was trying to figure out some other way to show my appreciation—not just for the books, but for convincing me to come, for getting the office ready, for the poem he’d left on the bulletin board—he was gone.
That was the first of his regular—always weekly and sometimes daily--visits to my office. Gremmels would go on to teach at least one class until his death, for another nine years. “You’re getting old,” I’d joke with him when he showed up to see me. “Don’t pretend you came to see me. I know what really happened—you forgot they kicked you out of here when you retired. And now you’re trying to cover it up.” He never found this funny, no matter how many times I tried the joke on him.
But he kept coming back. He’d just show up in the doorway and talk about politics, campus or state or national, and the conversations always began with a sentence like, “What the fuck does Bush think he’s doing now?” or “What in the hell was so-and-so thinking yesterday at that meeting?” Sometimes he would bring me a new book he was excited about—we didn’t always have the same tastes—and sometimes he’d show up with a regional writer and invite me out to eat with them.
When I had a student in my office, he would abruptly ask him or her, “Is she treating you all right? Not coming down too hard on you?” He’d say this no matter who the student was, and it wouldn’t matter if my door was opened or closed, if the student was crying over a break up or a bad grade or leaning over a paper I was discussing with her or sitting back and bullshitting about his day—Gremmels would walk right in as if he owned the place, like the ghost of the principal who had once run the school from that tiny office.
Sometimes he’d bring me gifts, usually things he thought I could use for the found poetry project I ran at the nursing home. In my early days at UMM, probably because nobody believed I’d want to stick around and everybody was busy with their own teaching and research, he was the only colleague who showed an interest in what I was doing with my students and those elders. Because this project was so important to me, and because he was the only one who talked with me about it, I can safely say that he was the main reason I chose to stay in Morris.
“I feel sometimes like you’re the only one who values my work,” I said once, after gratefully accepting an old-fashioned fishing pole I knew some of the old fishermen at the home would love to get their hands on. A few days later, he brought his son, who worked at a nursing home, to campus, and showed up saying he was taking me to lunch. Then he announced that his son would be doing a presentation in my class about how important our project was. I was irritated at the time—I didn’t need him to convince my students our project was important, I needed him to convince my colleagues. And, I resented being told what would happen in my class that day. I had a syllabus. I had plans. Now, looking back, I realize how kind this was—I never would have accepted an offer to lunch, or an offer to send in his son to help me out, and he knew this about me, so he simply made it happen.
During one of his visits to my office, he sat down to read me a letter he’d written to the editor, and we got to talking about politics. I don’t remember the topic, only that I got pretty passionate about something, and he respectfully disagreed. I think I may have told him he wasn’t truly a feminist—I can’t remember exactly. During one of the more heated moments in the conversation, a student of mine poked her head in and said, “Uh, Miss Manolis?” (She was the only student who has ever called me that, but no matter what I said, she wouldn’t give up the habit).
“Yes, Tina?”
“You missed class.”
And I had, totally. My class had ended five minutes earlier. Gremmels didn’t jump up, didn’t apologize. He just sat there calmly and turned to her and said, “We were talking about important things.” Then, he added, “Is she a good teacher?”
Flustered, Tina said yes.
“Treating you OK?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tina.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” As she was walking away, clearly completely confused by the interaction, and who could blame her, he shouted after her, “You don’t have to call me sir!”
There was another less frequent visitor to my office—our old chancellor, Sam Schuman. When he showed up, it was usually at 1 or 2 in the morning, and he would always tell me to go home, that I was working too hard. But, he also commented on each visit how my office was beginning to look more and more like Gremmels’. The longer I stayed at UMM, the messier and less organized I got. I swear it’s something about the office. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that I always keep my door open and try to be present with whoever wanders in, something I learned from him. And at times, that means I’m getting my work done on a wing and a prayer, and there’s no time to worry about anything but re-reading the text five minutes before class. Forget filing or cleaning or straightening up.
That was the most important thing I learned from him—that it’s not enough to show up and do the minimum, that a teacher has to truly be present for the students, meet them where they are, and that sometimes this means getting them into your office and bullshitting about things totally unrelated to the class, until you can find something they want to talk about, something they know more about than you do. Sometimes it means putting aside your own research priorities to pay attention (Gremmels and I both have some unfinished manuscripts stored away in drawers and closets and old hard drives), and often, it means not having time to clean up. And then, if you’re lucky, they’ll do their damnedest to write a decent paper or story or poem for you, to take an interest in what you want them to read, and talk about the work with you, and revise for you, and make it through the class, and then, eventually, through college.
The other thing I learned from Gremmels was the importance of being direct. I once complained to him that nobody I’d met in Minnesota, besides him, was ever direct about anything. “I’m not from Minnesota,” he said. “Plus, I had plenty of Greek friends in my day, before you, I mean. Did I ever tell you about…” and then he was into another story. Luckily, I wasn’t teaching that day, because it was a long one, and the beginning of many more stories of the early years of his marriage to Ruth and fun times they had with their Greek friends in Sioux Falls.
My favorite example of Gremmels’ directness was how he treated Rich Heyman, one of my closest friends who for several years had the office across the hall from mine. During my first year at UMM, Gremmels showed up at my office and said, without greeting me, as usual, “I don’t know what your politics are, but will you sign this?” He shoved a handwritten letter at me. It urged students not to vote for the esteemed Green candidate who was running that year, because doing so would be counterproductive—yes, his policies were sound, but he couldn’t win, and we desperately needed a Democrat in office.
Not really understanding the culture of the student newspaper—a problem, I might add, that has plagued me multiple times since I got here—I agreed to sign. Gremmels then handed the letter to Rich. Being perhaps even more direct that Gremmels, Rich told him he planned to vote for Nader, and furthermore, that he didn’t think it appropriate for faculty to urge students to do anything in their newspaper—a sentiment, I might add, that many students expressed in responses to the letter.
In any case, Gremmels never spoke to Rich again. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but at the very least, he was never polite to Rich again. Case in point: one winter, Gremmels showed up at my office and announced that it was time I learned to ice fish, and that he would be taking me that weekend.
“I don’t know, Gremmels. Sitting around in subzero temperatures on a frozen lake doesn’t sound all that much fun to me, even if there is beer,” I said to him.
From across the hall, Rich called out, “I want to learn to ice fish!”
“Did I invite you?” Gremmels called back at him. Then he walked away.
I never did go ice fishing with him, but I did have the pleasure of learning another trade from the master himself. About two years before his death, Gremmels came to my office and, uncharacteristically, sat down without saying anything. I knew whatever he had to say was serious, so I just waited.
He told me he had Parkinson’s, which I had already suspected. "It's getting worse," he said. "I can still play tennis and run the press, but not for long." And then he surprised me with a question: Might I be willing to take over the press? I knew the press mattered to him, but I had never been particularly interested, even though I loved the poems and invitations and other pieces he had printed over the years. But I said yes, nonchalantly, too busy worrying about getting ready for my summer class to think through what I was doing.
And then he asked again, a more serious look on his face—he wanted to make sure I really understood. “I want this to go on,” he said. “And I would be counting on you.”
What a gift to get this kind of request, to be trusted in this way. My immediate reaction was that taking over the press was an impossibility--I was teaching two summer classes, helping to plan a major community event, involved in other community organizations this summer...not to mention, I was in the middle of finalizing paperwork to adopt a child. But something about the way he asked me made me say yes.
During my first lesson, it took me two hours, approximately, to set and then dismantle my name and address. In the process, I learned how to find the letters and numbers in the tray, the age-old logic of where they were placed, to tell the M's from the W's, and to set the type so that it aligned perfectly and tightly, ready to be printed. He was the most patient teacher I’ve ever had, just watching, occasionally correcting what I was doing. When I told him so, he said, "Damned right. That's one thing I know for sure. I'm a good teacher."
And, as I was searching for the capital “M” for my last name, and then setting it upside down and having to turn it around—I realized that I was supposed to pay more attention. My mind slowed down. I was there, and I was focused, and I was letting myself care about nothing except correctly setting that “M.”
In a way, the lessons he had taught me came full circle as we continued to work together that summer and fall. As I worked, he would tell me stories about his life, or read speeches he or his son had written for the DFL, or letters to the editor, interrupting himself only to remind me to pay attention to what I was doing, or to correct a mistake. Once, we had to dismantle an entire stanza of a poem because of some mistake I’d made. I protested that there had to be a way to fix it, and he said, “No, not a chance. Sometimes, you just have to start all over.”
I think about that whenever anything goes terribly wrong—like the terrible semester I had recently when I got my lowest teaching evaluations ever, or when I lost many good friends to recent layoffs, or when I find myself screaming at my daughter, something I thought, before adopting her, that I would never, ever do. Sometimes, you just have to call it a night, or a week, or a year, and start over.
The semester before his death, during one of our last sessions at the press, I would confess to him that I hadn’t been caring for my students as much as I used to, that I felt disconnected, that I had lost my passion for teaching. I told him I wasn’t sure what was going on, and joked that maybe I needed a sabbatical, or a new job. And he said, simply, “Well, reconnect.” And then he said he had a letter he wanted to read to me. It was a barely literate letter, and I had no idea, when he began to read, who had sent it. When he was finished, he folded it and said, “That’s one of my old students. He didn’t graduate.”
“Sounds like he knew you pretty well, though,” I said. The letter had asked specifically about members of Gremmels’ family by name.
“Well, he lived with us for awhile, when he didn’t have any other place to go,” Gremmels told me. “Haven’t seen him in years, but we still keep in touch.” And then, his voice got just a little louder. “Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake! You just put the e in upside down.”
And, indeed, I had. Gremmels was like that—he had a way of helping me get my life in order in with the simplest stories or retorts. When my partner and I broke up, he responded, “That’s too bad, but I know you’ll get through it.” When I said I felt my work wasn’t valued and wanted to leave UMM, he asked if I valued what I was doing, and if I cared about my students—and then, when I said yes, he asked, “Why isn’t that enough?” When I said I was too busy to meet him at the press, he simply ignored my rambling lists of things-I-have-to-get-done-immediately and said, “OK, see you there tomorrow at 10.”
And, for some reason, even if was mad at how he didn’t understand the level of stress I was under, I’d show up.
During that same last session, I told him my daughter was driving me crazy, and I was beginning to wonder, during the first year after taking her into my home, whether I was really cut out to be a parent. He said, “She’s a teenager.”
“She’s not just an ordinary teenager,” I countered, frustrated. “She had a terrible life.” I could feel tears pressing against the back of my eyelids. I convinced myself that, like so many others, Gremmels would never understand what our new little family was going through.
“She’s a teenager,” he repeated, and then he moved on to another subject.
Sometimes the simplicity of his answers frustrated me—and sometimes I told him so. But he was never bothered by my frustration with him. He shrugged it off, or, sometimes, even laughed at it, which only made me angrier and more self-righteous. But now, looking back, I don’t see his reaction as disrespect, but rather, as the highest possible respect he could have given me: in short, he knew I was smart enough to come around, to hear what he was saying. It was, after all, just a repeat of the very first lesson, the one in the last stanza of that Gary Snyder poem he’d left for me:
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
Even at the end of his life, when the press went into storage due to a remodeling project and there was no clarity about where and whether it would be running again, when he was barely making it through the day, he seemed to be clear on one thing: that if you are present enough in your own life, and if you’re willing to slow down enough to connect with others, then your work in the world will matter. And he was right. When I think of him, I think of the only stanza in that Snyder poem, which I purposely skipped earlier, because it is perhaps the most poignant, and the best place to end, and to begin:
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
A Tribute to Gremmels
The first time I had a meal with Jim Gremmels, I was interviewing for the first of many versions of the job I have now at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He claimed to be retiring, and told me over cafeteria pizza that if I got the job, I would also get his office. By this point, he had asked me two questions, and two questions only: did I think I could live in this town, and did I really care about my students. I said yes to both, but really, I was just looking to get as far away from Phoenix as possible, and this seemed as good a place as any to land for a couple years. But I had been teaching long enough that I knew I meant the part about my students, though I had no idea until much later that there could be no comparison between my love for the young people in my classes, or anyone’s, and his.
He didn’t say much else during lunch—or at least, not much that I remember—but after that, he gave me a tour, which ended at his office. I had never seen an office so messy in my life. The floor was strewn with piles of files, random paper clips and slips of paper, and a thick layer of dirt. Large, open cupboards were overflowing with more files, more papers, and stacks of books. He didn’t apologize for the mess; he simply stepped over his piles while explaining, “Back before this was a college, it used to be the principal’s office for the ag school. That’s why there’s a button in the corner. He used to press this, see, and ring the bell.” He pushed his thumb against it, then turned to me and grinned. “But it no longer works, so I have no control over this place.”
I took the job, and arrived in the middle of summer, when most of my future colleagues and students were gone. And, while I’d hoped being in a small, quiet place would help me to center my hectic life for awhile, giving me time to read and write and think, moving into my new rented home and office had the opposite effect: I felt lonely. So, when I started moving into the office, it was good to have some signs of another human being in my midst—signs I quickly realized had been left for me on purpose.
He’d left a bulletin board with a poem tacked to it called “For the Children” by Gary Snyder. I could tell the poem had been printed on the old-time press he had proudly shown me during his tour. I didn’t think much of the poem at the time, but I realize now how prophetic it was, in a way, of my relationship with Gremmels. The first stanza reads:
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
I was starting my career, that steep climb on which I believed at the time this small college and office would be just a stepping stone—and he was ending his. Everything I would come to understand about who I was as a teacher, and a person—an understanding that would lead me, like him, to dedicate much of my life to this college on the prairie--would require fighting the facts of my life that, up to that point, had indicated I wasn’t going to be happy. I was going to learn how to fight the status quo, how to see the climb not so much as a way to get ahead but as a way to find a home, and Gremmels would play a big role in teaching me that.
When I opened the filing cabinet, I found a stack of books, mostly poetry by feminist and lesbian writers, in the top filing drawer. Apparently, he had already figured me out. There was a small piece of paper that looked as if it had been trampled over, no doubt a scrap he’d found on the floor when he was moving out. It said, simply “Thought you’d like these. –JG.”
I didn’t see him again until the first week of classes. “Did you find the books?” he asked me, appearing suddenly in my doorway. He wasn’t one for small talk or greetings—no “I’m glad you took the job” or “how has the adjustment been going?”
I looked up at him, startled. “Thanks!” I said.
“I thought you’d like them. They’re not on loan. Yours to keep.”
“Thanks,” I said again, and just as I was trying to figure out some other way to show my appreciation—not just for the books, but for convincing me to come, for getting the office ready, for the poem he’d left on the bulletin board—he was gone.
That was the first of his regular—always weekly and sometimes daily--visits to my office. Gremmels would go on to teach at least one class until his death, for another nine years. “You’re getting old,” I’d joke with him when he showed up to see me. “Don’t pretend you came to see me. I know what really happened—you forgot they kicked you out of here when you retired. And now you’re trying to cover it up.” He never found this funny, no matter how many times I tried the joke on him.
But he kept coming back. He’d just show up in the doorway and talk about politics, campus or state or national, and the conversations always began with a sentence like, “What the fuck does Bush think he’s doing now?” or “What in the hell was so-and-so thinking yesterday at that meeting?” Sometimes he would bring me a new book he was excited about—we didn’t always have the same tastes—and sometimes he’d show up with a regional writer and invite me out to eat with them.
When I had a student in my office, he would abruptly ask him or her, “Is she treating you all right? Not coming down too hard on you?” He’d say this no matter who the student was, and it wouldn’t matter if my door was opened or closed, if the student was crying over a break up or a bad grade or leaning over a paper I was discussing with her or sitting back and bullshitting about his day—Gremmels would walk right in as if he owned the place, like the ghost of the principal who had once run the school from that tiny office.
Sometimes he’d bring me gifts, usually things he thought I could use for the found poetry project I ran at the nursing home. In my early days at UMM, probably because nobody believed I’d want to stick around and everybody was busy with their own teaching and research, he was the only colleague who showed an interest in what I was doing with my students and those elders. Because this project was so important to me, and because he was the only one who talked with me about it, I can safely say that he was the main reason I chose to stay in Morris.
“I feel sometimes like you’re the only one who values my work,” I said once, after gratefully accepting an old-fashioned fishing pole I knew some of the old fishermen at the home would love to get their hands on. A few days later, he brought his son, who worked at a nursing home, to campus, and showed up saying he was taking me to lunch. Then he announced that his son would be doing a presentation in my class about how important our project was. I was irritated at the time—I didn’t need him to convince my students our project was important, I needed him to convince my colleagues. And, I resented being told what would happen in my class that day. I had a syllabus. I had plans. Now, looking back, I realize how kind this was—I never would have accepted an offer to lunch, or an offer to send in his son to help me out, and he knew this about me, so he simply made it happen.
During one of his visits to my office, he sat down to read me a letter he’d written to the editor, and we got to talking about politics. I don’t remember the topic, only that I got pretty passionate about something, and he respectfully disagreed. I think I may have told him he wasn’t truly a feminist—I can’t remember exactly. During one of the more heated moments in the conversation, a student of mine poked her head in and said, “Uh, Miss Manolis?” (She was the only student who has ever called me that, but no matter what I said, she wouldn’t give up the habit).
“Yes, Tina?”
“You missed class.”
And I had, totally. My class had ended five minutes earlier. Gremmels didn’t jump up, didn’t apologize. He just sat there calmly and turned to her and said, “We were talking about important things.” Then, he added, “Is she a good teacher?”
Flustered, Tina said yes.
“Treating you OK?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tina.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” As she was walking away, clearly completely confused by the interaction, and who could blame her, he shouted after her, “You don’t have to call me sir!”
There was another less frequent visitor to my office—our old chancellor, Sam Schuman. When he showed up, it was usually at 1 or 2 in the morning, and he would always tell me to go home, that I was working too hard. But, he also commented on each visit how my office was beginning to look more and more like Gremmels’. The longer I stayed at UMM, the messier and less organized I got. I swear it’s something about the office. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that I always keep my door open and try to be present with whoever wanders in, something I learned from him. And at times, that means I’m getting my work done on a wing and a prayer, and there’s no time to worry about anything but re-reading the text five minutes before class. Forget filing or cleaning or straightening up.
That was the most important thing I learned from him—that it’s not enough to show up and do the minimum, that a teacher has to truly be present for the students, meet them where they are, and that sometimes this means getting them into your office and bullshitting about things totally unrelated to the class, until you can find something they want to talk about, something they know more about than you do. Sometimes it means putting aside your own research priorities to pay attention (Gremmels and I both have some unfinished manuscripts stored away in drawers and closets and old hard drives), and often, it means not having time to clean up. And then, if you’re lucky, they’ll do their damnedest to write a decent paper or story or poem for you, to take an interest in what you want them to read, and talk about the work with you, and revise for you, and make it through the class, and then, eventually, through college.
The other thing I learned from Gremmels was the importance of being direct. I once complained to him that nobody I’d met in Minnesota, besides him, was ever direct about anything. “I’m not from Minnesota,” he said. “Plus, I had plenty of Greek friends in my day, before you, I mean. Did I ever tell you about…” and then he was into another story. Luckily, I wasn’t teaching that day, because it was a long one, and the beginning of many more stories of the early years of his marriage to Ruth and fun times they had with their Greek friends in Sioux Falls.
My favorite example of Gremmels’ directness was how he treated Rich Heyman, one of my closest friends who for several years had the office across the hall from mine. During my first year at UMM, Gremmels showed up at my office and said, without greeting me, as usual, “I don’t know what your politics are, but will you sign this?” He shoved a handwritten letter at me. It urged students not to vote for the esteemed Green candidate who was running that year, because doing so would be counterproductive—yes, his policies were sound, but he couldn’t win, and we desperately needed a Democrat in office.
Not really understanding the culture of the student newspaper—a problem, I might add, that has plagued me multiple times since I got here—I agreed to sign. Gremmels then handed the letter to Rich. Being perhaps even more direct that Gremmels, Rich told him he planned to vote for Nader, and furthermore, that he didn’t think it appropriate for faculty to urge students to do anything in their newspaper—a sentiment, I might add, that many students expressed in responses to the letter.
In any case, Gremmels never spoke to Rich again. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but at the very least, he was never polite to Rich again. Case in point: one winter, Gremmels showed up at my office and announced that it was time I learned to ice fish, and that he would be taking me that weekend.
“I don’t know, Gremmels. Sitting around in subzero temperatures on a frozen lake doesn’t sound all that much fun to me, even if there is beer,” I said to him.
From across the hall, Rich called out, “I want to learn to ice fish!”
“Did I invite you?” Gremmels called back at him. Then he walked away.
I never did go ice fishing with him, but I did have the pleasure of learning another trade from the master himself. About two years before his death, Gremmels came to my office and, uncharacteristically, sat down without saying anything. I knew whatever he had to say was serious, so I just waited.
He told me he had Parkinson’s, which I had already suspected. "It's getting worse," he said. "I can still play tennis and run the press, but not for long." And then he surprised me with a question: Might I be willing to take over the press? I knew the press mattered to him, but I had never been particularly interested, even though I loved the poems and invitations and other pieces he had printed over the years. But I said yes, nonchalantly, too busy worrying about getting ready for my summer class to think through what I was doing.
And then he asked again, a more serious look on his face—he wanted to make sure I really understood. “I want this to go on,” he said. “And I would be counting on you.”
What a gift to get this kind of request, to be trusted in this way. My immediate reaction was that taking over the press was an impossibility--I was teaching two summer classes, helping to plan a major community event, involved in other community organizations this summer...not to mention, I was in the middle of finalizing paperwork to adopt a child. But something about the way he asked me made me say yes.
During my first lesson, it took me two hours, approximately, to set and then dismantle my name and address. In the process, I learned how to find the letters and numbers in the tray, the age-old logic of where they were placed, to tell the M's from the W's, and to set the type so that it aligned perfectly and tightly, ready to be printed. He was the most patient teacher I’ve ever had, just watching, occasionally correcting what I was doing. When I told him so, he said, "Damned right. That's one thing I know for sure. I'm a good teacher."
And, as I was searching for the capital “M” for my last name, and then setting it upside down and having to turn it around—I realized that I was supposed to pay more attention. My mind slowed down. I was there, and I was focused, and I was letting myself care about nothing except correctly setting that “M.”
In a way, the lessons he had taught me came full circle as we continued to work together that summer and fall. As I worked, he would tell me stories about his life, or read speeches he or his son had written for the DFL, or letters to the editor, interrupting himself only to remind me to pay attention to what I was doing, or to correct a mistake. Once, we had to dismantle an entire stanza of a poem because of some mistake I’d made. I protested that there had to be a way to fix it, and he said, “No, not a chance. Sometimes, you just have to start all over.”
I think about that whenever anything goes terribly wrong—like the terrible semester I had recently when I got my lowest teaching evaluations ever, or when I lost many good friends to recent layoffs, or when I find myself screaming at my daughter, something I thought, before adopting her, that I would never, ever do. Sometimes, you just have to call it a night, or a week, or a year, and start over.
The semester before his death, during one of our last sessions at the press, I would confess to him that I hadn’t been caring for my students as much as I used to, that I felt disconnected, that I had lost my passion for teaching. I told him I wasn’t sure what was going on, and joked that maybe I needed a sabbatical, or a new job. And he said, simply, “Well, reconnect.” And then he said he had a letter he wanted to read to me. It was a barely literate letter, and I had no idea, when he began to read, who had sent it. When he was finished, he folded it and said, “That’s one of my old students. He didn’t graduate.”
“Sounds like he knew you pretty well, though,” I said. The letter had asked specifically about members of Gremmels’ family by name.
“Well, he lived with us for awhile, when he didn’t have any other place to go,” Gremmels told me. “Haven’t seen him in years, but we still keep in touch.” And then, his voice got just a little louder. “Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake! You just put the e in upside down.”
And, indeed, I had. Gremmels was like that—he had a way of helping me get my life in order in with the simplest stories or retorts. When my partner and I broke up, he responded, “That’s too bad, but I know you’ll get through it.” When I said I felt my work wasn’t valued and wanted to leave UMM, he asked if I valued what I was doing, and if I cared about my students—and then, when I said yes, he asked, “Why isn’t that enough?” When I said I was too busy to meet him at the press, he simply ignored my rambling lists of things-I-have-to-get-done-immediately and said, “OK, see you there tomorrow at 10.”
And, for some reason, even if was mad at how he didn’t understand the level of stress I was under, I’d show up.
During that same last session, I told him my daughter was driving me crazy, and I was beginning to wonder, during the first year after taking her into my home, whether I was really cut out to be a parent. He said, “She’s a teenager.”
“She’s not just an ordinary teenager,” I countered, frustrated. “She had a terrible life.” I could feel tears pressing against the back of my eyelids. I convinced myself that, like so many others, Gremmels would never understand what our new little family was going through.
“She’s a teenager,” he repeated, and then he moved on to another subject.
Sometimes the simplicity of his answers frustrated me—and sometimes I told him so. But he was never bothered by my frustration with him. He shrugged it off, or, sometimes, even laughed at it, which only made me angrier and more self-righteous. But now, looking back, I don’t see his reaction as disrespect, but rather, as the highest possible respect he could have given me: in short, he knew I was smart enough to come around, to hear what he was saying. It was, after all, just a repeat of the very first lesson, the one in the last stanza of that Gary Snyder poem he’d left for me:
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
Even at the end of his life, when the press went into storage due to a remodeling project and there was no clarity about where and whether it would be running again, when he was barely making it through the day, he seemed to be clear on one thing: that if you are present enough in your own life, and if you’re willing to slow down enough to connect with others, then your work in the world will matter. And he was right. When I think of him, I think of the only stanza in that Snyder poem, which I purposely skipped earlier, because it is perhaps the most poignant, and the best place to end, and to begin:
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
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