“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
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Some of This, Some of That 1, 129–170
This section contains miscellaneous stories involving students and former students.
Saved from Suicide
Near the beginning of a spring semester I was reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. At one point, he recounts the story of a group of Russian soldiers who were sitting around a fire on the evening just prior to a particularly vicious battle in the Napoleonic wars of 1808. One of the soldiers, who was torn to pieces the next day by a French cannonball, was telling tales of “moral beauty.”
I became captivated by the idea of moral beauty. I had never run across the phrase before and at first wondered what it might be. It occurred to me that it probably was akin to physical beauty in some way. Or at least one’s reaction to it could be like one’s reaction to physical beauty.
I remembered the time I had first seen Niagara Falls—I was instantly awed by its sheer magnitude. I recalled the moment I had gasped when I threw back the drapes of a motel room in Provo, Utah—a nearby mountain, which I had not known about, filled nearly the whole window. I recollected the occasion I had sat in a class on anatomy and physiology, utterly absorbed by the instructor’s descriptions of the absolutely fascinating workings of the human brain.
If one has these reactions to physical beauty, why, I thought, might one not have similar reactions to moral beauty, that is, instances of goodness that one encounters? I resolved to do an experiment. During the semester on ordinary school days, I would look for occurrences of kindness. I would be attuned to gentleness, both when it was exhibited toward me and toward others. At the end of the day I would go over these in my mind and see what my reactions to them were.
I did the experiment the whole semester. It worked. At the end of each school day, usually as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, I brought to mind the day’s observances of kindness and gentleness. They nearly always prompted in me a sense of awe and sometimes amazement. I was astonished at this, for it had never occurred to me that everyday activities could provoke such exhilarating feelings. I had thought that that was reserved for distinctive events or objects—the wild beauty one must travel long distances to observe.
“Susan’s” birthday came at the end of that semester. I said to her, “How about lunch in the cafeteria?” She said, “Okay.” So we met there the next day. She asked, “What have you been thinking about?” My eyes lit up. I explained how I had been intrigued by the idea of moral beauty I had encountered in War and Peace and how I had looked for it every day and had found cases of it, not just in what I had read, but in people around me. I had had numerous enlivening experiences.
Susan listened, but without much animation. After I had finished talking, she said, “Isn’t there evil in everyone? How can we see beauty in people?” She was not asking a question, I sensed, for her face was blank with incomprehension.
I didn’t know how to respond. Later I thought of lots of things I could have said. But then it felt as if she had thrown up an impenetrable barricade. I looked at her with the same blank incomprehension that she was directing toward me.
Summer came, and the memory of the conversation began to fade.
On the first day of classes in the fall, Susan stopped by my office. “How was your summer?” she asked. “Nice,” I said. “How was yours?” “Good,” she replied. She hesitated, as if wondering whether to say what she said next: “I almost killed myself.”
“Oh!” I said.
“How were you going to do it?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“I decided earlier this year that if things didn’t get better, I would drown myself in Lake Michigan. I’m not a very good swimmer, so it would have looked like an accident,” she replied.
“I see,” I said.
Then, “What saved you?”
“It was what you said about moral beauty.”
I was astonished. Her reaction had been so negative at the end of the last semester that it was hard to imagine a complete turn around. And it seemed impossible that simply observing goodness could have kept her from killing herself.
But it had, for here she was right in front of me saying that it had. I got a big smile on my face and held my gaze into Susan’s eyes for some seconds.
We talked about everyday things for a bit more. Then, as I walked Susan out the office and into the hallway, I said, “I’m glad you’re alive.” Her eyes shone as she turned to me and said, “Thanks.”
From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Book 12, chapter 13, translated by Constance Garnett:
Platón Karatáev “liked to hear the folk tales one of the soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but most of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile joyfully when listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word or asking a question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear to himself.”
“Thanks for Being Here”
One morning at the grocery store, I decided, on a lark, to do an experiment. When a store employee near the organic kale said, “Hello,” with a welcoming smile, I said, “Hello. How’s your life?” She didn’t hear it, so I asked again. “It’s good,” she replied. “Four healthy kids. And I’ve worked here for seventeen years.”
When I asked the cashier the same question, she said, “It’s my birthday today.” I said, “Happy birthday! Treat yourself to some kindnesses.”
Some years earlier I had started saying, “Thanks for being here,” to cashiers, both at grocery stores and in banks. I mentioned that in one of my classes one day. I can’t remember why. Maybe we were talking about gratitude.
At the end of that semester, one of the students, who had missed class too often and was sometimes late, wrote, “I’m sorry for not being in class all the time. I have had a very hard time with depression this semester. One time, when I felt I could not keep living, I remembered those words, ‘Thanks for being here,’ and I made it through.’”
I, of course, was astounded that such an offhand remark could have had such a considerable impact. I still am.
Sobbing
One day after everyone had left the classroom I had been teaching in, “Caroline” rushed back in, sat at a desk, and immediately started sobbing. I had no idea why. But I turned another desk around so that it faced her and sat in it.
Tears streamed down her face. I asked whether she had any tissues. She didn’t. I said I would be right back. I rushed to my office, which was not more than a hundred feet from the classroom, got the box of tissues that I keep for such occasions, and hurried back to the classroom.
Caroline had fallen onto her knees on the floor, still sobbing uncontrollably—huge racking sobs. She could not say anything. She could not look at me. I got on my knees, facing her, and set the box of tissues on the floor beside her. She took one.
She continued for close to an hour, occasionally saying, “It was so senseless.” Now and then she glanced at my eyes. I had tears in them. At one point she said something I can’t remember. But it did not reveal what was going on or what had happened.
From time to time, her crying slowed down a bit. But then it started up again, just as intense.
Finally, she was calm enough to leave. I said that she didn’t have to come to the next class period. I left for home.
Somehow I had figured out the city where she lived. When I got home, I put her name and the name of the city into Google. The very first link told the story.
Her father had been stabbed to death in his home, and Caroline’s mother had almost been stabbed to death.
Caroline had been away on a school trip when it happened. I tried to imagine someone telling her what had happened when she got back. The murderer had not yet been found.
Two days after she had fallen to the floor sobbing was the one-year anniversary of those stabbings.
In addition to the anniversary that had triggered her reaction, there was the issue we had dealt with in class that day—the problem of evil: Why would a good and loving creator allow evil and pain? I may have mentioned murder in class.
Here, I thought, was the problem of evil made personal in one of the sharpest ways I could imagine.
Nine years later I went to her wedding. A memorial candle for her father was up front, lit by Caroline’s mother. Caroline came down the aisle with a huge smile on her face, which she kept through the entire ceremony.
Again, tears came to my eyes. All I could think of was the enormous and wonderful contrast of that smile with those sobs nine years earlier.
Weddings
The first weddings former students invited me to took place in 1992, maybe earlier. I wondered what I could give them in addition to a card.
Somehow I got the idea of making a “love plaque.” I bought 5” x 7” unfinished plaques with French corners, finished them, penned the couple’s names near the top of the plaques, curved, then painted three hearts underneath their names with dots around their perimeters—two little ones aiming at a large one.
There were two advantages to doing this. I would never have to figure out what to give to the couples, and what I did give would be personalized, made expressly for each couple.
I kept track of all the plaques I made—it came to 190 between 1992 and 2024. I could not go to all of the weddings, but I did go to about half. I loved each one.
Sometimes there were unexpected adventures. On the way to Mandy and Justin’s wedding, my car got a flat tire. “Oh, no!” I thought. “I won’t make it.” Just as I was kneeling at the side of the car, in my wedding clothes, to see where I should put the jack, someone said, “Do you need some help?” I pointed to the tire, and he promptly changed it for me, then drove off in his big pickup truck.
I didn’t want to drive the rest of the way on the spare tire, so I pulled off, found a service station that could fix the flat tire right away if I put it onto the car after they fixed it. I rolled the tire across the parking lot, they fixed it, and I replaced the spare with it. I got to the wedding just as the reception was starting.
A couple of years before Mandy and Justin married, Justin went off to Oxford, England, for a semester. This was long before Facebook and free internet video calls. I had gotten a calling card that charged two cents a minute for calls to England, so I volunteered to let Mandy call Justin from my office phone, using the calling card. I stepped out of the office when Mandy came, and when I returned after an hour she was still talking with a big smile on her face. Thirty years later, Justin wrote that those calls helped keep their relationship alive. That made me smile.
At another wedding, I accidentally locked myself out of my car after I had parked at the wedding site. The spare key was in a little magnetic box underneath the front of the car. At least, I thought it was. How was I going to find out in my wedding clothes? I didn’t want to wait until after the wedding and stew during it about whether I could get into the car. I did the only thing I could. I lay on the ground in the parking lot, fished for the magnetic box, found it, and unlocked the car with the spare key. My clothes were okay.
Kristen and Brady were getting married in Denver in July. I found that out before I had made reservations for my annual trip to the Colorado mountains, so I made reservations for the week of the wedding. That year I packed some nice clothes along with my tent, sleeping bag, and other camping gear. And I made a foray into city streets containing tightly packed houses.
Matt and Camilla were getting married in central Nebraska and would I read a poem at their ceremony? “Yes,” I said, “if I can get there.” A freight train I had ridden a couple of times before left from a yard west of Chicago to a city in eastern Nebraska. Sometimes I succeeded in getting on that train, and sometimes I didn’t. I could try to catch it, take a bus part way from eastern Nebraska, and try to hitchhike the rest of the way. I had never hitchhiked before. I told Matt and Camilla I might be there, but not how I might get there.
I left a day early in case I couldn’t get on the once-a-day train that pulled out of the yard west of Chicago the first time I tried. I caught it the first time, took the bus, hitchhiked three times (someone offered me two dollars while I was trying to hitchhike one of those times, evidently thinking I was homeless), and arrived right at the park where the wedding was to take place. I slept that night in a pavilion, read the poem at the wedding, and bribed my way back home in a crowded car by offering to pay for gas. I didn’t tell Matt and Camilla how I traveled to their wedding until years later.
Sometimes there was dancing at wedding receptions. I had never danced, but I could jumble around in the way I saw others doing it. So I did, with wild abandon.
In 2004, Christina and Joe asked me to officiate at their wedding. I had no idea how to do that, so I looked online at several wedding ceremonies. The three of us got together and settled on the details. I told them that I could not legally marry them and that they would have to go to a justice of the peace for that.
I had given a talk at an earlier wedding, so I used that talk, hoping that no one who had been at the earlier wedding was at this wedding.
The reason the two had asked me to do their wedding, they told me, was that they knew I would be nonsexist. I was. Instead of introducing them at the end as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph D_______, I introduced them as Christina G_______, the wife of Joseph D________, and Joseph D_______, the husband of Christina G_______. There were a number of other nonsexist items in the wedding as well.
I have done three other weddings as well: Mary and Bryan, LeAnn and Chuck, and Melissa and Marcin. I introduced Mary and Bryan as “Mary and Bryan, Bryan and Mary, newly married.”
“The Delights of Married Love” is at www.cliffordwilliams.net/marriedlove, and “How to Do a Nonsexist Wedding” is at www.cliffordwilliams.net/weddings.
For instructions on how to do a love plaque, put <How to Do a Love Plaque Cliff Williams> into YouTube.
Social Lies
I woke up one weekday feeling pretty lousy. I was somewhat debilitated, had a mild headache, and could not function well. All I wanted to do was to lie on the couch all day. But, unfortunately, I wasn’t so bad that I had to stay home. I could still be in my office and go to class.
I had been wondering for some time what it would be like always to tell the plain truth whenever someone said, “Hello. How are you?” It occurred to me that if people did, they certainly would not always say, “Just fine” or “Good,” with an accompanying smile.
I decided to do an experiment. When someone said, “How are you?” I would say “Pretty lousy.” That was, indeed, the plain truth.
I went to school, walked into the building where my office was located, started to walk along the hallway, and saw Doug. I said, “Hi, Doug.” He replied, “Hi, Cliff. How are you doing?”
I said, “Pretty lousy” and kept walking.
He yelled after me, “Why?” I kept walking. I certainly was not up to explaining why I didn’t have much energy.
I went to my office, fortunately not seeing anyone else as I did, and closed the door, unlike my usual practice.
I don’t remember other specific responses, but I do remember that nearly all of them were like Doug’s, though not usually so demanding. Only one or two were consoling. I responded to those with heartfelt gratitude.
I also remember that I had to stop the experiment. It took too much emotional energy to deal with the responses. So I lied: “Good.”
I have been lying ever since, though not all the time. Sometimes, when I am in the right context, I tell the truth—“Pretty good, though lately I have been experiencing such and such.”
As a result of the experiment, I discovered that social lies are needed not only to maintain one’s own energy but also to lubricate interactions with others. I am guessing that some people recognize that while others unwittingly regard the lies as the real truth about the liars.
Becoming a Poetry Person
When I was in my late twenties, an English professor at the college I was then teaching at put his hand on one of my shoulders and said, “Cliff, poetry is not for you.” I had just said something like, “I find poetry mysterious” or “I’m not able to understand what poetry is all about.” Also, the English professor probably saw something about who I was then that prompted him to say what he did, perhaps that I was too logical or analytical to appreciate poetry.
A dozen years later, in 1985, an English professor at a different college and I were talking about enhancing the academic atmosphere at the college. One of us came up with the idea of having a literary journal for poetry and creative nonfiction. I volunteered to get it going.
I asked the academic dean for money to print the journal, got together a few students who would select what would go into it, and gathered student contributions. I still did not understand poetry, but I did realize the importance of it in an academic context. English departments had courses in poetry, and Linda herself had studied it when getting a master’s degree in English Literature.
I read all of the student entries before giving them to the student co-editors, and I met with the co-editors while they discussed and selected entries for the journal.
Reading student poems changed me. For one thing, I learned which poems were good and which were not so good. For another, I could see that the authors were trying to say something true and important in short, crisp sentences with well-chosen words. Often those words painted a striking picture.
I found myself liking poetry more and more. I read other poetry and discovered that you could read a poem months or years after you first read it and still get something significant from it.
Years later, Stephen talked to me about founding a poetry journal to be called Smartish Pace, which he did in 1998. Students sent me poems to read and comment on, even after I ceased being involved with the literary journal. Tramaine holds the record—twenty-five and then a hundred and thirty-six, some of which appeared in her Phases, published in 2025. Kevin sent me the second most—close to a hundred.
A few friends and former students published small books of poetry—chapbooks—which I own. I even wrote a bunch of poems. When I sent some of them to Stephen, he wrote back on 14” x 17” paper that was rolled up in a cardboard tube.
I continue to read poetry, sometimes pulling a poetry book off a shelf of one of Linda’s bookcases.
A few of my favorite lines:
“If the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.”
– Mary Oliver, “Landscape,” Dream Work, 1986: 68
“We have only begun to imagine the fulness of life.”
– Denise Levertov, “Beginners,” Selected Poems, 2002: 137
“Practice resurrection.”
– Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Collected Poems, 1984: 151
“Hammer on doors with the heart.”
– Sister Maura Eichner, “What My Teachers Taught Me I Try to Teach My Students,” Hope Is a Blind Bard, 1989: 144
“If you can dance, dance.”
– Sister Maura Eichner, “Out of Cana,” Hope Is a Blind Bard, 1989: 116
This last line was a favorite of mine decades before I started barn dancing in 2023.
Smartish Pace can be found at https://smartishpace.com.
Tramaine’s Phases: Poems is listed at www.amazon.com/Phases-Poems-Tramaine-Suubi/dp/0063344912/
Coincidences
You can’t live long without unexpectedly running into people whom you know at random places.
I was traveling in Peru and decided to visit a little town south of Lima called Huacachina. It had a lagoon in its center and was surrounded by enormous sand dunes, much, much larger than the dunes along the southeastern edge of Lake Michigan.
I decided to take an hour-long ride in an open jeep on those enormous dunes. Half way into the ride, it stopped for a few minutes so that we passengers could walk on the dunes. I had no sooner walked a little way when someone ran toward me yelling, “Cliff! Philosophy! Danielle!”
It was Danielle from my previous semester’s Introduction to Philosophy class. She was on a tour to Peru, which had gone to Huacachina the same afternoon I had. She had seen me in Huacachina from the jeep she was in as it passed me while I was sitting in a jeep at a different company there, waiting to leave. And the jeep she was in had stopped near me on the same dune and at the same time my jeep had stopped.
We talked for a bit before going back to our jeeps.
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One Saturday afternoon while Linda and I were in Oxford, England, for two months in 2008, I decided to go to the Oxford bus station to check on the bus schedule to the Cotswolds in southwestern England. The station was crowded, with people moving this way and that. Suddenly, I saw a tall, thin person who looked like Jeremy, whom I had known at Wheaton College when I was teaching there in 1998–1999. I thought, “It might not be Jeremy, in which case I will be embarrassed.” But I decided I would feel worse not to ask than I would feel if I were embarrassed.
I went after him and said, “Excuse me. Are you Jeremy?” The person replied, “No, I’m Andrew. But Jeremy is my younger brother.”
I smiled and introduced myself.
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One sunny afternoon while I was hiking on a trail in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the early 2000s, a twenty-something person who was carrying a small child passed me just after he had rounded a bend in the trail. I did not recognize him—when you are out hiking on a remote mountain trail, you are not looking at people you pass to see whether you know them.
But he recognized me. Not ten steps after he had passed me, he said, “Are you Cliff?”
I stopped, turned, and said, “Yes!”
It turned out to be Andy, who had been in a class of mine at Wheaton College in 1998–1999.
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Ten minutes after encountering Andy, I ran across large, flat boulders just off the trail where you could see a panoramic vista. The boulders were about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet long, the only such geological arrangement I had seen in the mountains. I stepped onto them at one end to see the vista.
Just then, a middle-aged woman and man stepped onto the boulders at the other end. Immediately, the woman yelled to me, “I know you. What is your name?”
I yelled back, “Cliff Williams.”
“We’re David Mackett’s parents. We saw you at the commencement last month.”
I had read a prayer at the Trinity College commencement celebration where David was graduating. He had been in a class of mine a year earlier.
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In the late 1990s, I was riding my bicycle on the asphalt path that led to Trinity College. It was a cool March day, and I was wearing my Columbo-style trench coat. I passed someone who was walking on the path and whom I did not know. Then I heard, “Are you Clifford Williams?”
I stopped, turned, and said, “Yes.”
“I read your book, Singleness of Heart,” the person said.
“How did you know me?” I asked.
“I saw your picture online.”
I smiled.
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I needed something from the local hardware store. It wasn’t in one aisle, so at the end of the aisle I started to make a U-turn to go into the next aisle. And just as I did, I almost bumped into Mary, whom I had not seen for two or three years.
We got delighted smiles on our faces.
I have not, however, seen or heard from her since then.
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I was out travelling on a train someplace and decided to take a bus somewhere. I went to the local bus station. Maybe it was Omaha, Nebraska. Maybe it was some other place, I don’t remember.
It was about lunch time, and I had found a corner of the scroungy bus station to sit in while eating a sandwich. I had a good view of the people who were entering the station after disembarking from incoming buses. Occasionally, I glanced at the incoming passengers.
Suddenly, there was Graincar George, whom I had met at the annual hobo convention in Britt, Iowa. I jumped up and ran to him.
Ever after, when we saw each other at the hobo convention, we mentioned that unlikely event.
Once I asked Graincar George what it was like to be on a moving freight train. He replied, “You’re rocking with the steel.”
A Story in a Tree
Ann, Katie, and Meghan were a trio when they were in college. I decided to write them a story in which they were the main characters and which took place in the Hundred Acre Wood, where Winnie-the-Pooh lived. So I did. I called it “The Three Rabbits.”
The first paragraph went like this:
“Once there were three rabbits who lived in the Forest. Their names were Ann, Meghan, and Katie. Ann lived next to a dandelion patch, Meghan lived behind a large oak tree, and Katie lived on the other side of the pond.”
Ann decides to go on an adventure. So she goes to get Meghan and Katie to go with her, but finds notes at their places saying that they are out on an adventure together. Ann goes wandering and runs into a bear, who says his name is Edward. The two of them go walking and see the noses of Woozles that are making their way down the stream, which are really the noses of Meghan and Katie pretending to be Woozles.
Ann and Edward find a hole, which they jump into, and harumph like a heffalump, because that is what heffalumps do when they fall into holes. Meghan and Katie hear the harumphing and think they are hearing a heffalump.
The four of them run into each other and tell each other what they saw and heard. They all laugh when they hear what was really happening.
Then Katie says to Edward, “You look just like Pooh.” And Edward says, “I am Pooh. My real name is Edward Bear, but everyone calls me Pooh.”
The four of them go to Ann’s house for tea and honey, where Pooh eats most of the honey.
“Ever afterward, Ann, Meghan, and Katie remembered the day as The Day We Met Pooh. And Pooh remembered it as the day he met his three favorite rabbits.”
I decided that the best place to read this story to Ann, Katie, and Meghan was in a tree. The tree I selected was in a little grove of trees several blocks from our house in Deerfield, Illinois. The first branch was about ten feet off the ground and could be reached only with a ladder.
When the three came over on the Saturday afternoon just after the last day of classes of spring semester in 2004, I got out our sixteen-foot ladder, with its two eight-feet sections. Two of us carried the ladder to the grove and set it against the tree. Then all of us climbed the ladder and settled into several of the large branches.
No sooner had we gotten there when the ladder fell over. “Oh, no!” I exclaimed. “We won’t be able to get down.” Hardly anyone ever passed that little grove of trees. And around the base of the tree was a pile of brush, which could have hurt an ankle of someone who dropped onto it.
Just then someone passed by the path that led into the grove. I yelled. The person came and righted the ladder. Then I read the story to the three rabbits. We all giggled.
When we got back to our house, Linda joined us as we sat at the dining room table eating cookies and drinking milk, all silent. After a bit, Katie said, “This feels like kindergarten.”
That is one of my all-time favorite things a student has said.
See www.cliffordwilliams.net/thethreerabbits for the full story.
The Secret Fort
One fine afternoon in April of 2009—April 2, to be exact––Tabitha stopped by my office to talk. She said she didn’t want to talk there and maybe we could walk around campus. I said, “Sure. If you’d like, we could go to the forest next to campus, and I could show you where someone built a little shed out of plywood.” I had discovered it the week before when I was wandering around in the forest. It had been dismantled, except for the floor, but still it struck me as fascinating that someone had built a livable structure right in the middle of those three or four acres of trees next to the campus.
Tabitha said yes, so we headed toward the forest, then into it. But we never made it to the shed, because on our way we ran into what looked like a little two-sided lean-to that someone had made of downed branches. I got excited. “Oh, look! A little fort!”
We couldn’t get into it easily, but there was a block of wood and a tree stump near it that we could sit on, which we did while we talked.
I was so excited about the little fort that I wanted to tell someone else. Tabitha mentioned her two friends, Sara and Becky. I called them on Tabitha’s cell phone after we got back to my office. They both rushed over and we walked to the forest and made our way to the little fort. There was no straight path to it, and the forest was big enough that you could walk from one end to the other and miss the fort. But we found it.
One of them said, “Oh, it’s too bad you can’t get into it very well.” Just then, I noticed that a large branch had fallen up against a tree not more than thirty feet from us and was triangularly shaped in such a way that you could lean little branches against the two long sides of the triangle to make another little fort.
I said, “Look! We could make a fort of our own.” So we did. Or at least we got started on one. We found three, four, and five-foot branches and lay them against the two sides. Sometimes we broke a longer branch in two. We made sure there was a decent entrance to it. The tree served as the back.
We decided to keep it a secret, except for Tabitha, of course. Over the summer, I went a couple of times and put a few more branches on the sides and then sat in it. A time or two I ate lunch there.
When the fall semester came, Sara, Becky, and I decided the fort was too good to keep secret. So we decided we could tell others about it, provided we told them that it was a secret and that if they wanted to tell anyone else, they could, provided they too said that it was a secret.
A year later, in September of 2010, I put a little notebook and pen at the base of the tree and triple bagged it with sealable plastic food bags. It was for visitors to the fort to sign or write down their thoughts.
I occasionally took someone there. If a former student stopped by my office and the weather was good, I said, “Do you want to sit here and talk or go to The Secret Fort?” They wanted to go to the fort. Sometimes I took a bunch of current students.
Every time I went I put more branches onto the sides, filling it out quite nicely. I made a sign for it that said, “The Secret Fort.” I brought a few small blocks of wood for people to sit on.
And then two years later, alas, someone told me that a tree had fallen onto it. I went to investigate. A tree had, indeed, fallen onto it. It had badly dented the fort and blocked the entrance. You could just barely get into the fort from the back. But no more than one person could sit in it at a time.
I brought a couple of hand saws to school and invited a couple of students to help me cut back the fallen tree. But it could not be done with hand saws. The tree that had fallen onto it was five or six inches thick. We three left sad.
And that was the last time I ever went to the fort.
Hit by a Goose
Every now and then Trinity College students told me that they have heard I killed a goose. Here is what really happened.
For nineteen years I rode my bicycle to Trinity College every day until the owners of the property at the end of the street that ended at the college’s campus put up a fence blocking the path onto campus. One day I headed toward the student center on the sidewalk that goes from the main academic building to the student center. It looked as if it would rain that day, and I wanted to park my bicycle underneath the overhang at the center.
On the sidewalk ahead of me, about seventy-five feet from the entrance to the academic building (this was before the music and education addition to the building had been built), stood four or five geese. Another dozen geese stood on the grass on either side of the sidewalk. I was riding with my hands on top of the handlebars, but when I saw the geese on the sidewalk ahead of me, I dropped to the lower part of the handlebars and gunned it.
Most of the geese got out of my way. One goose, unfortunately, hit the front wheel of my bicycle, which jolted the bicycle so much that had I not been gripping the lower part of the handlebars I would have been knocked off the bicycle and likely would have hit the sidewalk. I didn’t fall, however, so I rode to the student center, locked my bicycle, and walked back along the sidewalk.
The geese had walked a respectful distance from the sidewalk, but at the place where one of them had hit my bicycle there lay a handful of feathers. I picked the feathers up, carried them to my office, and then took them to my first class of the day for show and tell.
The next day also looked as if it would rain, so I rode toward the student center again. There, at the very spot I had encountered the geese the day before, stood a bunch of geese, maybe the same ones. Again, I dropped to the lower part of the handlebars and gunned it. (One would think that my near fall the day before would have taught me a lesson.) This time, fortunately, the geese scattered in time. On neither day, I am happy to report, were there any geese corpses lying on the ground.
In Students’ Dreams
If you are a teacher, you will undoubtedly be in some of your students’ dreams. Here are two I have been in, as described by the students who had them.
Food Fight
“I dreamed that I went back to my old high school. I was in the lunchroom getting my lunch. At the end of the line there was a plate of corn dogs, and you were there. You went to grab a corn dog, which I know you would never do because you’re vegetarian, but you grabbed for it and I grabbed for it, because there was only one left. I had the better angle on it, but I let you have it. You looked like you really needed it. Actually, I wanted to wait for the new batch.
“I watched you go sit down. You sat across from a few students and beside a few students. You were right in the middle of everything, and you had a big smile on your face. You reached into your pocket and pulled out what looked like little shavings of white chocolate. With your eyebrows raised you dusted the person in front of you with the white shavings. The person looked at you as if to say, “What are you doing?! Are you serious??”
“Instead of apologizing or trying to make things better, you just sat there, and the smile never left your face. You went into your pocket again and you did the exact same thing—you dusted the same person with the shavings. He couldn’t believe that you did it again. He sat there in disbelief and watched as you went into your pocket yet again and dusted the person next to him.
“The other person wasn’t as compassionate or understanding as the first person, because he took his mashed potatoes in his hand and threw them at you. So you had mashed potatoes all over your face. And you still were smiling. You went into your pocket once again and again you dusted the person who threw the potatoes at you.
“At this point, the first person took his corn and threw it at you. You had potatoes and corn all over you. A whole congregation of students were now watching to see what would happen next. And, out of nowhere, everyone decided to start throwing food everywhere. That’s how you incited a food fight at my old high school.”
On the Floor
“I fell asleep while studying for the philosophy final. I dreamt that I walked into your classroom, and as I was walking to my seat you gasped for air and fell to the floor. I couldn’t believe it! The worst part was that the entire class had calm looks on their faces and didn’t make a move.
“I started yelling at the top of my lungs for someone to call 911, but I had to take matters into my own hands when no one budged. As soon as I shakily dialed 911, you opened your eyes and smiled!! I quickly hung up the phone before the dispatcher came on the line. As I sat back down, I said to myself, ‘I knew that would happen.’ (I’m not sure why.) I woke up then and laughed because I can see you doing something like that, but maybe not as extreme.”
Thirty-Five Minutes of Nonstop Listening
Dave rushed into my office, plopped himself onto the easy chair opposite the wood chair I was sitting on and instantly started talking. Something unpleasant had happened, and he was disturbed about it.
He was talking so fast that I could not say much without interrupting him. During the thirty-five minutes he was unburdening himself, I said eight words. “I see” were two of them, and “Oh my” were another two.
He got up with the same speed with which he had entered my office and said as he left, “I feel better now.”
I was astonished that simply nodding my head from time to time and saying a mere eight words could have had such an effect.
Signed Up for Facebook
In November, 2004, Randy burst into my office and exclaimed, “Cliff! Are you on Facebook?” I said, “What’s Facebook?” He replied, “Here! I’ll get you on.”
He sat at my computer and after a few minutes said, “You’re on.” He got up and as he was halfway out my office door, I asked, “What’s the password?” He turned and replied, “Philosophy,” then went on his way.
“That’s the Only Thing Keeping Me Alive”
“Beth” was suicidal. She stopped by my office from time to time, and I listened to her distress. At one point, she had to have her stomach pumped because she had OD’d on drugs. One evening, she left a suicide note under my office door, which I read first thing the next morning. Whatever she did then, she survived.
Then one day Beth stormed into my office declaring belligerently, “I’m going to kill myself, and there isn’t anything you can do to stop me!!”
I said, “Yes, there is.”
She retorted, just as belligerently, “What!?”
I said, “I care about you.”
Beth slumped in the easy chair she had plopped herself in, and as tears came to her eyes, said in a broken voice, “I guess that’s the only thing keeping me alive.”
Embarrassed at a Wedding
It was a hot day as I drove to a wedding, eighty or eighty-five degrees, at least. My 1990 Toyota Tercel had no air conditioning, so I rolled down the windows all the way. It wasn’t until I reached fifty miles per hour, though, that the wind felt a bit cooler.
My legs, however, were still very warm, as they were not a direct recipient of the wind. So the next time I stopped I rolled up my pant legs. That made a definite difference.
The wedding was outdoors. I arrived early and said hello to Kendra, a former student. We sat down on a couple of the chairs midway left to right and midway front to back.
The hot sun beat on my legs. Without thinking, I rolled up my pant legs up to just below my knees. “Ah,” I thought. “Better.”
That lasted a full five or ten seconds, at which point I suddenly realized what I had done. “Oh!” I exclaimed.
I rolled my pant legs back down, then gave Kendra an embarrassed look. We both burst into laughter. Fortunately, no one else saw, as hardly anyone else had arrived.
The Flying Belt
The new buckle gleamed brightly in the noonday sun, brighter than the chrome tables sitting in front of the Mexican café as Randy and I stood in the middle of the parking lot. It was Sunday afternoon, and I had gone to meet Randy at the café where he works. I knew by the sweat dripping down my forehead that it was definitely not a day to sit outside. We had previously been hibernating in the café’s cool air conditioning, discussing the day’s events, including my newest purchase.
“I don’t like standing in front of a classroom full of students with a worn-out belt,” I said to Randy in the café. “So after church, I stopped off at Walmart to pick up a new one.” I had set it on the front seat of my car.
It’s a sad day when one has to retire a good, old belt. But this one had seen too many days. Despite my generally somewhat careless attitude toward attire, I would be embarrassed to stand in front of thirty aware students wearing a belt that had become conspicuously shabby.
In the café, Randy had a gleam in his eyes as he told me of a new book of poetry by Seamus Heaney he had recently purchased. Knowing my love for poetry, he leaped to his feet and told me he would run out to his car to get the book. I decided it would also be a proper time for me to get a copy of my recently published book so we could share a show-and-tell moment.
The heat beat down on us as we stepped out of the café and forked our paths, each to his own car. When we reached the middle of the parking lot, I turned toward Randy, who by this time was about a dozen feet from me, and shouted, “Hey, Randy!” He turned around and looked at me with a wondering look on his face.
“You want my old belt?”
“What?!”
“Would you like my belt?”
“Okay,” he replied hesitantly.
I unbuckled the shabby belt, which I still had on, pulled it out of the loops, and sent it flying. It flapped in the air like a flag on a pole and landed in his hands. He had an astonished but gratified look on his face.
A smile rose on his face from cheek to cheek as he said with a chuckle, “Thanks, Cliff!” He opened the door to his car, laid the belt on the warm seat, and closed the door. I took my new belt out of my car, put it on, then strolled back to the café.
Written with Randy Hofbauer.
Painting Faces
I invited some students over for a Saturday supper—Titus, Dorothy, Jon, Liz, Caitlyn, Ryan, and Miranda. They arrived early, and we all made a big pot of lentil-vegetable soup. (Liz especially liked it that supper was vegetarian.) Linda put a vase of daffodils onto the table. After supper, we painted each other’s faces with acrylic paints and little paintbrushes.
There isn’t much more to say about the event, though here is a picture of Liz painting my nose.
A Forgotten Lunch
I packed my lunch that day as I usually did but forgot to take it with me. “Oh, no!” I thought when I realized I had forgotten it after I had gotten to school. I had only an hour and ten minutes between classes at eleven and one, and I could not walk to my bicycle after the eleven o’clock class, bicycle home, eat lunch, bicycle back, walk to my office, get my notes for my one o’clock class, and get to class five minutes early, as I like to do. (It did not occur to me that I could have eaten in the college’s cafeteria, so ingrained was my habit of eating my own lunch, even when I went to the cafeteria.)
So in my eleven o’clock class, I told the students that I had forgotten my lunch and asked whether anyone could drive me home (which would take only five or six minutes) and stay with me as I ate lunch. I promised to make them a Cliff-lunch that they could eat with me.
Tommie volunteered. He drove me home, I made him lunch, and we ate lunch together at the kitchen table. I got back to school in time to go to my office, get my notes, walk to my one o’clock class, and say hello to students as they arrived.
Holding My Hand
Sarah, a twenty-five year old former student who had just become a nurse, was going to be in town from Kansas and could she see me? I replied that yes, I would love that, except that I couldn’t meet her in a coffee shop, as Linda was dying and I was staying with her full-time. However, we could sit on the front porch of our house for a while. Sarah asked for Friday morning at ten. I said that would be just fine.
On Wednesday evening, Linda’s death rattle started. I thought about cancelling Sarah’s visit, but instead let her know about the death rattle. I said my final goodbye to Linda. The death rattle continued into Thursday, and I said my final goodbye again. Sometime during Thursday night and Friday morning, she stopped breathing. I discovered that at 6:15 Friday morning.
I got a shower, ate breakfast, called our daughter Laura, sat for a time on the couch next to the hospital bed on which Linda lay, then called the hospice nurse who had been coming to see her. The nurse arrived nearly an hour later, filled out the death certificate, pulled Linda’s rings off, and called a local funeral director, who arrived about a quarter to ten.
At ten, I stepped out onto the front porch, and not more than a minute later Sarah came walking along on the sidewalk. She got a big smile on her face when she saw me. I headed toward her on the front yard intending to tell her that Linda had just died. But I found myself ready to burst into tears. So when I got to her, I simply waved her in. Her smile disappeared.
I had been told by a hospice nurse not to witness Linda’s being taken away, as the memory of it would be etched on my mind the rest of my life. When it came time for the funeral director to take her, I went to another room. Four or five minutes later, Sarah came to get me. Just as I got back to the living room, I glanced out the bay window there and glimpsed the funeral director’s vehicle driving away, taking my Linda in it.
The hospice nurse left. At that moment, I was desperately happy that someone was with me, as I was terrified of being alone in the house in which Linda would be forever absent.
Sarah and I sat on the front porch. She listened to me talk about Linda. I burst into tears, and she immediately grasped my hand tightly and held onto it. That happened twice.
I listened to her tell me about recent events in her life, which also was salving. Several hours later, she left.
How do you thank someone for their deep and gentle presence at a time you most needed it?
Watching Anne of Green Gables
I liked the television episodes of “Anne of Green Gables” so much that Linda gave me the DVDs of those episodes for Christmas one year. A couple of years later, in September of 2018, I was studying in some remote corner of a building at Wheaton College when Annie, who was exploring hidden recesses of the building, spotted me. I don’t know how we got onto Anne of Green Gables, but when we did I invited her to bring two or three of her friends over on Friday evenings to watch the four episodes of the movie.
She came with Audrey and Hannah, and along with Linda, we all watched two episodes that fall semester—four of us squeezed into the living room couch and one sat on a cushion on the floor. Then we had honey-applesauce cake I had baked.
The second semester Sophie joined us, which meant that two of us had to sit on cushions on the floor, which also worked just fine.
At the end of that semester, just a few days before commencement, I volunteered to take all four students to Blackberry Market in Glen Ellyn for tea. We sat talking for a while. Then I lifted my bag of bubble-blowing equipment from under the table, and we spent twenty minutes across the street blowing bubbles.
Staying in Touch with Former Students as They Age
I used to think it would be cool to be in touch with former students when they turned forty. Then when some did, I started thinking that it would be cool to stay in touch with them when they turned fifty. Recently, though, I have started thinking that it will be cool to be in touch with former students when they turn sixty. I am a little behind, though, as Mike is sixty-two and Ellen is sixty-four. So now I find myself thinking that it will be cool to be in touch with former students when they turn seventy. I would have to be in my late eighties, though, and it is by no means certain that I will get there. Still, it is something to hope for.
The coolest thing of all is to be in touch with a former student who is ninety-one. That’s Fred, who turned ninety-one in June of 2024. When Fred was eighty-three, he audited a class of mine at Wheaton College. Then he audited another and another, then the first one again. Each time, he came to class with the pile of textbooks for the course. For a couple of years, I went to see him here in Wheaton, Illinois, once a month or so. We sat for an hour, talked about nothing in particular, and then I left.
I took my clipboard and pen a few times when I visited Fred to write down his insightful observations. Here are a few of them:
“There are lots of things in the back of our minds that keep us on edge.”
“It’s good just to see someone.”
“It is so enlightening to see how things that happen in our lives bring meaning.”
Recently, though, Fred has not had enough energy for me to visit him.
I need to add that I didn’t start staying in touch with former students until the early to mid 1980s, fifteen years after I started teaching, in 1968. That’s because I was something of a hermit during nearly all of those years. It took the transformation described in “Learning to Listen” on page 20 for me to realize that other people exist and that I wanted to welcome them into my life. If I had learned to listen when I first started teaching, I would now be in touch with former students who are in their midseventies. Alas, I am not.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams