SCHOOLED:
DONALD HALL AND ME

I was in my car in the grocery store parking lot, listening to Terry Gross interview poet Donald Hall, my old English professor.

Gross asked Hall how he liked being old.  Hall couldn’t complain, he said, but then he did for several minutes.  Hall talked about how he had published a story in the New Yorker in which a security guard at the National Gallery had treated 83-year-old Hall like a child; the guard had leaned over to Hall, who was in a wheelchair, and asked, “How was din-din?”

I could listen to Hall talk about aging all day.   I didn’t really want to get out of my car and shop for prunes, yogurt and salmon.

I used to be a lot younger . . .

Fifty, for instance.  In 2000 my then-teenage son attended a New Hampshire summer camp an hour from Hall’s house. I visited the camp on parents’ day.  Should I look up my English teacher?  I had taken courses from Hall 30 years earlier?

Maybe Hall lived way back in the woods.  Maybe he sat on his front porch with a shotgun.  I didn’t know.

Hall’s house was not deep in the woods.  It was about 50 feet from a federal highway and across from a summer camp.  (There are a lot of camps in New Hampshire.)  He could sometimes hear “Reveille.”

Hall was happy to see me, and said pretty quickly, “I’m rich.”  Hall made his money mainly from his award-winning children’s book Ox-Cart Man. Only a poet would ask, “Are you rich?” He added, “How about you?”

“I’m doing OK,” I said.  I had a kid at a New Hampshire summer camp. Enough said.

In 1973, when I had graduated college, Hall discouraged me from returning to Cleveland. He had said, “Why do that — to sell insurance?”

I went home.  I “sold insurance.”  I joined my father’s real estate biz.

Hall took me to a fancy restaurant near his farm.  I said, “I own and manage apartment buildings.  I’m a landlord.  And I play clarinet.” Meaning: I can improvise. I’m still in the arts!

My first year at Michigan, Hall had looked like a stock broker. He went hippie about a year later, I think. In New Hampshire he wore a hippie shirt, and I was the guy in the polo shirt.

Hall quit his tenured job at Michigan in 1975 and moved to his grandfather’s farm near Wilmot, New Hamphsire.  Hall did exclusively freelance writing.

At the restaurant, Hall said he had traveled to the Amazon River on a private jet with a Michigan grad who had made it big in the movie business.  The student owned a movie company.  Hall said, “His family was in the grocery business in Detroit, until I warped his mind.”

Hall warped many minds. He told me to guard against bitterness.  His late wife, poet Jane Kenyon, had died five years earlier, at 47.  I remembered her from English classes.

Hall had struggled with colon and liver cancer, which was supposed to have killed him, but didn’t. Instead, his wife died from leukemia.  He said, “Every generation thinks they know more than the next generation.  Schopenhauer was writing about this in the 1700s. You don’t know more than the next generation.”

Hall wouldn’t even let me pay the tip.

The next day I drove to Manchester, New Hampshire, and flew back to Cleveland to evict people, fix leaky faucets and collect late rents.  It was not poetic.

Eleven years later I mailed several of my published op-eds to “Donald Hall, Eagle Pond Farm, New Hampshire.”  (He doesn’t use email.)  I wrote: “From your student — your 61-year-old student.”  I dated the letter.  Hall is big on dates.

Don wrote back, “I know you know I know that you feel old and know you are not.”

Get out of the car.  Buy the prunes, salmon and yogurt –- and some beers.

I want to make it to Hall’s age.

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Donald Hall, 84, is poet emeritus of the United States and a recipient of  the 2010 National Medal of Arts.

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by Ralph Solonitz :