The blogger went down to Georgia

I spent part of Friday and most of Saturday roaming around the town where Susie and her family had spent the past two years before going to Jordan, and eventually realized that what I was trying to do was to imagine what it might have been like if I had gotten around to visiting them while they were in Georgia. Probably not a healthy habit to encourage; however, Milledgeville is a pleasant old town, and both the owner of the superlative bed & breakfast where I stayed and one of the other guests staying there knew Susie and Joel. The other guest was one of Susie's colleagues in teaching creative writing at GCSU, who had since moved on to Pennsylvania or New York. It was interesting to hear some of the things she & Susie had talked about regarding teaching, students, careers, academia, etc. It was oddly invigorating to hear her describe how she & Susie used to pass notes back and forth in faculty meetings, chuckling at private jokes and minor absurdities, because that's how I remember Susie and her roommate acting on the first day I met her.

I doubt that a memorial service can ever be described as "enjoyable", but I'm glad I went. It was held on Sunday afternoon in a rustic wooden building on a forested hillside overlooking a small lake belonging to the university, decorated with photographs, flowers, and several of Susie's paintings. The head of the GCSU creative-writing program read a piece from Rumi "invoking poetry"; someone played some classical guitar pieces; and four of Susie's students read selections from her poems, including a couple of works not yet published. Another student read a startlingly effective poem she wrote after hearing about the accident. Several people, including Cyrus's kindergarten teacher and Joel's uncle, talked about their experiences and memories; I talked briefly about some memories from Thee University. ("Welcome to the bridge, Counsellor....") They played a recording of Susie reading a poem as a prelude to a musical piece on a CD which was put out by the Hope College Jazz Ensemble in 2002.

It was good to see and hear Susie's influence in her students' lives. At one point, one of her students commented that the last time they talked, they had been standing almost where we were standing, and (oddly enough) reminiscing about her time at Thee University, a time which Susie seems to have regarded with a great deal of ambiguity. (She spoke on more than one occasion of being so bored her first week in Waco that she went down to the train yards and tried to hop a freight out of town. )

I'm a bit dubious about going to the memorial service planned by the University of Nebraska, not because I think it's wrong in any way for them to hold one, but because I don't think I particularly need to go through such things over and over again. However, I will be very pleased to make the trip in order to meet up with any mutual friends who plan to be there.