Full moon musings

The memorial service was held tonight for two English professors, the one I mentioned last week, J0anne N0rman, and one I didn’t know, J0hn S0l0m0n. What is especially weird is that they were both medievalists, and he was hired to teach her courses when she went on medical leave a few years back. The service was nice, a little stiff maybe, but the eulogies were heartfelt, and a couple of people read stuff in Old English (“EaIa earendei” from Christ I translated by one of the deceased and read by a friend of his, and the Lord’s Prayer read in Anglo-Saxon by the dean of humanities). There was a time of fellowship (where do these expressions come from?) in the faculty lounge following the service, and I got to meet a young man, a computer science student, who is the boyfriend of the girl who was at the skating rink last week and who monopolized me for the whole time, talking about religion, Dr. Seuss, and various other topics.

I came away from the memorial with the distinct observation that Anglo-Saxon sounds like Norwegian, and plays havoc with your brain in that you think you should understand it, and certain words actually sound like you recognize them, but in the end, it’s really a different language. Also, the girl who eulogized the two professors had been a student of both of them, and said that Dr. N0rman would dissect essays by reading her line-by-line analysis into an old-fashioned cassette tape recorder and handed the cassette back to the student along with the paper. It sounds daunting.

As we were headed up the stairs to the faculty lounge, one of our colleagues mentioned that as time goes by, these events were bound to be happening more often. I fear that this is true. In the time that we have been at Bushop’s, I have already attended, and sung at, quite a few funerals and memorial services. That won’t be changing any time soon.

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