This Feels Strangely Familiar: A Remembrance of Peter

It took me years to get those souvenirs

And I don’t know how they slipped away from me

-Steve Goodman & John Prine

1999 Miami University CSP Class, Photo by Peter Magolda

I lost my Ipod last spring.  The little plastic compartment between the two seats of our pickup, which served as its home, flooded.  A camelback hydration tube got stuck under the lid.  As I moved my guitar from its daytime storage place on the bed of our tiny vintage trailer, to its nighttime place on the front seats, the weight provided just enough pressure on the bite valve, and the water flowed.  In the morning, I discovered the tiny swimming pool, and to my horror, my Ipod scuttled on the bottom.  

  

As a music storage device, it was manically disorganized and almost freakishly random, reflecting the brain and musical taste of its owner.  At least a hundred times, I entertained thoughts of wiping it completely and inflicting a new organization upon it.  But as you guessed, I never did.  Then fate took away that option.   

One of the losses in its collection was a mix of Steve Goodman music .  A professor in my higher ed. administration grad program at Miami University, Peter Magolda, made the mix for our Student Cultures class.  The songs accompanied the course material and informed our discussion of ethnographic research.  I didn’t know the singer / songwriter, but I knew the songs; and if you grew up in the 70’s or 80’s, you do too.  He wrote “City of New Orleans” which Arlo Guthrie, then Willie Nelson, and then many others, turned into hits.  The refrain goes, “Good morning America, how are you?  Don’t you know me?  I’m your native son…”  I fell in love with Steve’s iconic voice, passion for The Chicago Cubs, quirky subject matter, clever turn of phrase, musicianship, and the way his music told a story through attention to the details.  It helped me engage with the course in a profound way.

When listening to that Ipod over the years, often on random, I was surprised how frequently a Steve Goodman song came up.  I knew them all by heart, and each time I heard one, I’d think about Peter, my other faculty Marcia and Judy, my classmates (one now shares the cab of my truck), all while singing along.  Maybe his music came up more frequently than other “unlabeled artists,” maybe it was in more than one place, or maybe I just took more notice to those tracks.  My Ipod seemed to love his music as much as I.

Just a few short weeks ago, I learned that Peter Magolda passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in Virginia, where he and Marcia (his wife and colleague of 33 years) retired.  Peter never wanted any memorial service, expressed that clearly to Marcia, and so our common grief seems reduced to texts, personal messages, posts to Peter’s wall on Facebook, and cards in the mail.  Like so many of Peter’s family, students, friends and colleagues, I am trying to find a way to honor the impact he had on me.   

Peter and 1998 CSP Grads Diana Jaramillo and Kim Dutton

Music was a central passion in Peter’s life, loud and raucous, and it rubbed off onto anyone in his sphere.  In 2000 he introduced me to his latest gadget, the Ipod – the original one with a wheel.  “C’mon, name a song, I bet I can find it in under 3 seconds!” he challenged.   So, it was with no small degree of regret and sadness I fished my obsolete piece of technology from the water.  Of course, I can get the music back, I probably even have the CD packed away in the small collection of our things remaining in storage.  But I can’t get back that jumbled assortment, that uniquely random way that Peter and my graduate student experience flashed back into my life through powerful, and potent memories.

When I first met Peter, I had no idea who I was as a student, what I had signed up for, or if I would even last the semester.  Peter seemed to sense this.  And like a good teacher, he kept any doubts he had to himself.  After pulling an all-nighter writing for his course, I found myself unable to stay awake in class.  When my chin hit my chest and startled me back into the reality of my consequences for the fifth time, he looked right at me, cocked his head a little, and spoke up, “Hutch!  What’s up with you today?” 

I had struggled with my essay into the early hours of the morning – it just wasn’t working for me.  I knew if I didn’t like it, Peter probably wouldn’t either.  He always showed up with his A game and had the audacity to believe that his students should as well.  I deleted my entire first draft and started fresh at 2 AM still searching for mine.  I could only blame myself; I apparently cared enough to work through the night, but hadn’t yet learned to plan, prepare, and recognize that the best writing requires time and editing. 

I lost touch with Peter and Marcia over the last 10 years, as my path diverged farther from the career which began in their classrooms.  But I never lost my appreciation for the orbits we mutually inhabited; I always thought that I’d be able to swing by wherever they settled and pick up where we’d left off.  Again, like my Ipod, fate stepped in.

Peter and 1998 CSP Grad Tracy Davis

In the duet Steve Goodman recorded with John Prine, “Souvenirs,” the singers bemoan the loss of the little trinkets collected along life’s journey, symbols of memories that make up a life well lived. “I don’t know how they slipped away from me?” they ask.  Songs like these seem written for moments in life where we can’t find the words to express our own feelings of loss, the times which are both strange and yet somehow familiar.  Moments in life both ordinary and sublime were Steve’s preoccupation.  

Just as his body of work was starting to really take off, Leukemia claimed his physical body at a young 34.  This might explain why so many of his songs capture moments with hyper-awareness – as if he lived on borrowed time.  His wife, Nancy, wrote in the liner notes of his first posthumous album;

Steve was exactly who he appeared to be: an ambitious, well-adjusted man from a loving, middle-class Jewish home in the Chicago suburbs, whose life and talent were directed by the physical pain and time constraints of a fatal disease which he kept at bay, at times, seemingly by willpower alone . . . Steve wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could . . . He extracted meaning from the mundane.

Peter loved his music, perhaps because he shared the artist's love for details.  For me and my classmates the take away was that the things we often take for granted are worth noticing and investigating.  Indeed, the minute details of our routine lives might provide crucial insight into how we are in this world as we move through it with others.  

In writing our observations of college students, he implored us to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.  He poured his heart and soul into the feedback on our writing like a man possessed with notes in the margins, corrections within the paragraphs, whole essays of commentary on the blank “B” sides of our papers and enthusiastic reactions when he really liked something.  He taught me that it is no small thing to constantly believe in someone’s potential, especially when they make rookie mistakes like falling asleep in class.  I have tried to pass this on.

Marcia posted on Peter’s wall a few weeks after his death; and in it I found a sentence that is going to stick with me, “His sudden departure is mind numbing, the silence deafening.”  In one line of excruciatingly specific detail, she captured the complexity and richness of their intertwined lives as well as the depth of her loss.  

Marcia also implored us to carry on Peter’s song as he would have wanted, “in the way you [we] move in the world.”  I like that.  Even as we move further away from moments of loss, as the bright lights we previously used to navigate our world grow dim in the receding distance, we still have a song to sing. It is shaped by all the memories, experiences, and significant people in our lives, but we who remain must choose how best to sing it. 

Just like in grad school, I’ve procrastinated finishing this essay because I simply don’t know how to end it.  I have been stringing it along for weeks not wanting to conclude.  In the end, all I have is this; “thank you Peter, I love you.”