Category Archives: Denton

And I said that was good

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This needs poetry, but prose is all I have to give it, at least today. An old friend and colleague at St. Barnabas Church in Denton, Texas, has died—Bob Lockwood. The obituaries will tell you he was Robert Minturn Lockwood, III, M. D., whose profession as a radiologist hardly defined him. They will tell you of his devotion to Ann’s Haven Hospice in Denton, a pioneering effort in the hospice movement and one of the large works of his life. I didn’t know Bob at the time Ann’s Haven began and can’t speak of that, but his friends and acquaintances who are quoted in the newspapers speak eloquently of his service to the community and how it grew out of his grief over the death of his beloved first wife.

Bob was almost a renaissance man when I knew him, as close to that ideal as any son of the twentieth century could come: physician, scholar, poet, playwright, churchman, birder, naturalist, gentleman farmer—a longer list could be made. He was also an idealist with an almost Emersonian edge of Yankee shrewdness (though he wasn’t literally a Yankee) in spite of all the years he spent in Texas. He was a brilliant man who chose to find his destiny in the community of scholars assembled around two universities in the little town of Denton, Texas, a long way from Harvard and Penn Med. Circumstance was part of the reason why, but also a certain venturesomeness, I thought, coupled with a tendency to discount his accomplishments. Bob sometimes spoke of his career at Harvard as though he had been a failure and treated his medical credential as slight achievement. He was not a proud man, at least not when I knew him. When he retired he sold his radiology practice and went to work for the people who bought him out. But he also translated Brecht’s Theepenny Opera once, because he thought the popular adaptation (Blitzstein’s, I guess) was too tame. Bob’s father had been a professor of Latin and the Librarian of Haverford College, also the college’s informal historian and a devoted teacher. Students dedicated their yearbook to him in 1924. Maybe some of Bob’s interests, as well as the shaping of his character, began at home.

For the better part of ten years I knew Bob at St. Barnabas—many knew him better than I. But we served together for a year in a discernment process that brought us close, and we shared a heart-wrenching experience of the death of a beloved priest and friend that surprised us like a thief in the night. When I learned of Bob’s own death, I first turned to a poem he wrote in 1993 as a memorial to Charles Williams, the rector of our church at that time. Charles had been diagnosed with lung cancer just shy of his fiftieth birthday and was taken from us swiftly, in less than six months. Bob’s poem is a powerful reflection, not just upon Charles’s time with us and his death, but also upon how Charles talked with us about his death as he was dying—in a series of wonderful pastoral letters. Just before he died, Charles asked me to put together a small book of his sermons; I asked Bob if I could include his poem in the volume. I’ll not quote it entirely, just the conclusion.

And then you died—and were no longer there
       I saw your chest x-ray myself.
       It said DEATH—soon, no matter what.

So then, we cared for you (with a little help from the hospice).
And as you died
       you learned
       you grew
       you bloomed.
It was beautiful, it was terrible.
We wept.

Now please live on in us your friends
We are now more connected, more a Church, more the Body
Because you cared about us.

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan—may we meet again in the spring.

In his second life, the only life in which I knew him, Bob devoted himself to land and to practicing what we are now coming to call sustainability, raising chickens and bees, the farm where he lived with his second family a favorite resort of at least a couple of generations of children at St. Barnabas—a chosen place, a Vergilian place if you will—it’s useful at my age to learn what one thinks. I didn’t know Bob’s family, never went to his farm. He always came to church alone, as I do mostly now, myself, church being something my beloved and I do not share. I knew about Bob’s second life, the private part of it, only from conversations with him; but I believe the farm had been his renewal, or perhaps his last reinvention, of himself.

Now as I reread Bob’s poem I particularly think about its last line, an allusion to a place invented by Professor Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard sings of it in a wonderful song that recalls one of the Genesis creation stories:

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!
And I said that was good.

Tasarinan, in the legendarium of Tolkien’s Elves, is part of the lost flat world, now “under the waves,” that preceded middle earth in the same way that the legendary world of gods and heroes preceded classical antiquity, where the stories of that former world were regarded as history. As the members of the ring fellowship bid farewell to Treebeard midway in their journey, Treebeard speaks these poignant words: “I too must bid you now farewell. I do not think that we shall meet again. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I—I smell it in the air.” To which Elrond replies, “Maybe not in Middle-earth, Fangorn. But when the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again, then in the willow meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring.”

Did Charles and Bob read Tolkien together? I don’t know—I’m not sure I even want to know. But I think I understand that in wishing his dear friend and priest a pagan immortality, Bob meant to wish Charles a place in a time out of time wherein the difference between Pagan and Christian has been erased—and the world in which humans dwell with fire and water, beasts and great trees, no longer innocent, has found a new beginning.

—I can think of no better wish for Bob himself, or for us all.

at home in Denton

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I have several home towns, and I expect I’m not different from many Americans. Lots of us have lived in a good many places long enough that we acquired a sense of belonging there that never quite leaves, so that we’re surprised and sometimes saddened to return and see changes, feeling that we’ve lost something when some landmark disappears, or thrilled and excited to note that some wonderful new thing has arrived in our absence.

Ten days ago I went home to Denton, Texas, in many ways my favorite home town; though I was not born there and didn’t attend high school there, and therefore can’t exhibit two important markers of a normal hometown claim. Still, I love Denton; it remains a funky little college town in spite of growth that places it inside what is now called the metroplex by many residents of the Dallas/Forth Worth area. And it continues unique in my mind and memory, partly because of its funkiness and partly because of its excellence.

The excellent, first. I attended a performance of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem at Winspear Hall on the campus of the University of North Texas, long known for its fine College of Music. The conductor was my friend, Henry Gibbons, who is retiring from that college after after a career that has spanned thirty-plus years. The Brahms concert was his retirement celebration. The hall was packed, his colleagues were there, the stage and parts of the balcony were filled with an ensemble made up of UNT massed choirs, the Denton Bach Society (of which I was once a singing member), and the UNT orchestra.

It was a performance about which I cannot be objective. I will not attempt to review it. But I thought the choral singing superb, possessed of a clarity both of purpose and execution that startled me in the opening measures of the first movement and thrilled me to the point of tears many times. I sang with Hal Gibbons for seventeen years. Perhaps he will not mind if I characterize him as a musical humanist and suggest that his reading of the Brahms seemed to me to flow from a profound understanding of the Germanic character of the work and of Brahms’ music as a realization and fulfillment of its text.

Recordings are now available in CD and DVD format. The Denton Bach Society website offers information about ordering them — I have ordered both. If you click the thumbnail above (thumbnails in this blog are always live links) you’ll be able to see somewhat less than half the ensemble. I didn’t take this picture, but I think the photographer chose this angle to avoid including a central sound reflector, which was rather brightly lit, in the photo. On the left you can see part of Winspear Hall’s magnificent new organ, completed last year.

Now, the funky. Readers of this blog may remember that I’ve written before about a Denton neighborhood known as Fry Street. For a while I attempted to further the goals of a Denton organization that called itself Save Fry Street. Well, that organization disbanded and closed down its quite good website after a fire destroyed a number of Fry Street institutions, or what remained of them after the human beings moved out, having been evicted by a predatory developer. I took a look at the absence that is now the corner of Fry and Hickory, climbed the staircase to the roof at what is left of Cool Beans and had a beer in the middle of it. The sight was so depressing that I couldn’t stay long.

But later that evening I visited the Greater Denton Arts Council and watched as several panels were unveiled from the mural that once had appeared on the outside north wall of Jim’s diner. Here’s a photo that shows how the mural looked early on before Jim’s built a porch that adjoined it, which Bagheri’s (an Italian restaurant that replaced Jim’s) kept, along with the mural. Pieces of the mural were saved from the June, 2008 fire and ultimately donated to the Arts Council. Three panels, created from those pieces of wall, are now permanently and prominently mounted at the northwest corner of the Visual Arts Center at Hickory and Bell, as you can see in the second photo. A fourth panel, made from the door whose inside you see in the photo of the mural that was, will be displayed inside the Center. I wondered why at first and then realized that the door was made of wood — a minor miracle that it was preserved.

I spoke with the president of GDAC, and with old friends who live in the historic district that adjoins Fry Street, during the reception that followed the unveiling. What I could glean of the news from Fry Street in those brief conversations suggests to me that there’s not much remaining of the developer’s plans that precipitated the destruction and that new plans for the area are waiting for people to think them up as well as for the arrival of bettter economic times. I also heard of changed minds and hearts on the city council and at UNT (Fry Street sits at the northeast corner of the UNT campus. Both UNT and Denton city government at one time supported the depredations of United Equities). I think if I were one of the proprietors of the Save Fry Street website I’d be thinking of putting it up again. That voice may be both necessary and relevant in the coming months. I’ve just learned of a recent documentary about this history that looks promising as well.