Legendary force passes on

Ottilie Stafford passed away yesterday afternoon. She was in her late 80s and had suffered from esophageal cancer for the past several months, so it was probably a blessing that she finally is at rest. But it's sad to me all the same. She was a legend in her own lifetime in Adventist English and education circles. And she certainly was a force in my life, dramatically changing the whole direction of my life.

I took my first class from her as a freshman and my last as a master's student in the American Literature on Location program. I clearly remember whole days of both classes. I even remember the first paper I wrote for her and her bloody red comments. "The ocean is my abyss" was one of my lines. I thought the paper rather beautiful. She thought it rather sappy. I came out of that experience feeling like Anne of Green Gables having to purge all her favorite lines from a story she wanted to get published. But I also came away as a better writer. It was in that class that I first read and watched A Man for All Seasons, a play that I just started teaching my seniors on Monday, ironically. I will never forget all we discussed about the play, and to this day, I call those things up when I teach it. Friday, when I am back in the classroom, I will tell my seniors about Ottilie, and I will mourn yet again her loss.

I not only took several classes from her during college, but also acted under her direction a number of times, both in college and later when I was teaching at nearby SLA. I remember once how flattered I was that she said I was a true "O'Neillian" actress after I had played the part of an overwrought mother in a play that a classmate had written and directed. I remember the extreme pleasure I felt when she asked me to call her Ottilie instead of Dr. Stafford when, as an academy teacher, I produced several of the plays she directed. I never felt quite comfortable doing it, though, I had such high respect for her. I can still hear her saying it to me, though, as we tooled around town in her pickup (!) picking up props for the upcoming performance of Robert Frost's Death of the Hired Man.

Frost. That was the last class I took from her. And she asked us the question at the beginning if we thought Robert Frost was a great poet. That was the thrust of the three-week intensive. I was dying to know what she thought, but she never told us...until the last day...that she did, indeed, think he was great.

I always knew when she was ready to end class when she would say "Well, alright." I have found myself doing that many times. It was a private joke to me when I'd hear myself say that. My students, of course, had no idea that yet again a great teacher was informing my own teaching.

She sometimes terrified me...or rather intimidated me. You never wanted to be caught saying something stupid. But that made me work all the harder. And yes, it was absolutely nearly impossible to get an A out of her. But that, of course, made you work all the harder. The thrill of victory when an A appeared on a paper was incomparable to that of any other A...

This morning, as I was driving into So. Lancaster, I didn't know yet that she had passed away. But I thought of her even as I was taking these pictures of an apple orchard and pine wood separated by a stone wall. Robert Frost's poem came to mind...and with any thought of Frost comes hard on its heels a memory of Dr. Stafford. In her honor, then:

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

~Robert Frost