I begin this new blog with a sad post. Donald Murray died on December 30, 2006. He was 82. I didn't know Don well enough to write a sort of obituary here, but I did know him well enough to mourn this loss.
Don is arguably the first legend I really got to know. Tom Newkirk might actually be the rightful owner of that title, but when I met Tom, got to know Tom, I didn't know he was a legend. Don? I knew. And I was nervous.
Honestly, I'm not completely sure when I first met Don. The first time I saw him was during a staff meeting. Tom Newkirk invited him to speak to us about writing. I'm sure Tom explained who he was, but I was a Lit person at the time and while I really enjoyed Don, I don't think I really understood who this giant of a man in red suspenders was. I don't think I knew what he meant to UNH. But by the time I sat down to talk to him, though, I knew.
I was writing a paper on Don for one of my history of composition courses. I was arguing that even though Don is labeled an expressivist, that title was simply too reductionary. So I decided to interview the man himself. I called him up and left a message and, wonder of all wonders, he called me back.
I remember answering the phone and hearing, "Abby? It's Don Murray." He was incredibly hard to hear over the phone and I was pacing up and down the apartment with the phone pressed painfully to my hear, straining to hear him. By the time we were done with the conversation, I had an appointment to come over and interview him.
I'm embarassed of our interview. I didn't know how to interview someone and here I was, trying to talk to this Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He was incredibly kind to me. And the thing about Don, he could talk. So I just let him talk. Talk about overhauling the composition program at UNH, about being in the war, about teaching journalism.
The best thing about my interview with Don is that I got to know him, and he got to know me. And my husband. When Beej dropped me off that day, he and Don clicked immediately. They had both been in the military (Don had been a paratrooper in the war), and Don said that in his other life, the one he didn't lead, he was a police officer. And anytime I saw Don after that, he asked about Beej.
The last time we really got to talk, Don took Beej and I out for steak so that he could talk to us (primarily Beej) about the novel he was writing. It was about cops and he wanted to know if Beej would read it when he was done. I wonder, now, how far he got on that novel. What it would have been about, in the end. And what Beej would have said to this mountain of a man, when he read a draft. One of the things I love about my husband is that he understood the weight of Don Murray asking him to read a draft of his novel. And one of the things I loved about Don was that he didn't think there was anything out of the ordinary about it.
When I finished interviewing Don he told me that I should call him again, that we should have breakfast or lunch at Youngs (which we did), and that he wished that more composition students would call him. It's inappropriate, he said, for him to grab people off the street and talk writing. But that's all he wanted to do. He wasn't as much a part of the UNH community as he used to be, and he knew it. But he wasn't sure why.
I told him that he was a little intimidating. Why? he asked. He was genuinely confused. "Well," I said, "You're Don Murray."
"Ahhh, that's bullshit." He practically bellowed it. But then he laughed. He had this whole body Santa Claus laugh, and this huge smile, and I swear his eyes twinkled when he smiled or laughed. He was simply a lovely man. Always teaching, always talking, always laughing, and always always writing.
In the face of his death, I comfort myself with this: Don lived an extraordinary life. Paratrooper, journalist, Pulizer Prize winner, writer, teacher, husband, father, friend, and hockey fan. He loved his wife, Minnie Mae, with intensity and devotion. He was genuinely respected and adored, and he died at 82 still writing. He died among friends. Should all of us be so lucky.
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