1. Yesterday, when I wrote about my last days with Rita Hennessy, I didn't include how Rita and I became friends.
Back in 1993, I agreed to join Rita and team teach courses in Philosophy and English Composition. We met with our students three days a week in two hour sessions and our team taught courses were wildly eclectic. We not only read standard texts in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, but we also explored how philosophy could be understood through the study of poetry, novels, personal essays, movies, the insights of Carl Jung, the lectures of Joseph Campbell, world religions (particularly Buddhism and Taoism), the spiritual traditions of Native people, acting, and visual art. The arc of Rita's classroom instruction always bent toward integration and our students brought the connections between multiple ways of seeing the world alive through writing scripts, acting, art projects, essays, writing poetry, and a variety of other creative ways of wrestling with the world's copious philosophical ways of understanding right from wrong, the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and more.
Rita and I were small town kids. I grew up in Kellogg. Rita grew up in eastern Montana (the name of her hometown has slipped my mind). Somehow, our small town origins gave us an intuitive understanding of each other, including the intoxicating experience we both had when, as college students, the arts, literature, history, and our love for learning electrified us.
Our teaching partnership at LCC ended in the fall quarter of 1999 when Rita retired.
Teaching as partners established our friendship. In the years after Rita retired, our friendship deepened. We collaborated on a handful of teaching projects while she was teaching part-time at Portland Community College. Once she moved to Creswell, I visited Rita every time I came to Eugene from Maryland and after I moved back to Kellogg. We enjoyed food together at the Creswell Bakery. We had long talks about our families, our questions regarding God and prayer and living a spiritual life, about philosophy and philosophers, and about teaching. We never stopped reflecting on what we thought worked best to help students learn and never stopped talking about the ways we worked to bring the best we could out of our students. It was all connected: to both of us, teaching was itself central to our spiritual and philosophical quests.
2. Debbie and I enjoyed a small filet of salmon and a spinach salad for dinner. Simple and fortifying.
3. We continued our routine of gin and orange juice and episodes of Columbo and Perry Mason. I don't know how long this routine will last, but, for now, it's a perfect way for Debbie to wind down after working with energetic third graders all day and it's a fun way for us to spend the evenings together.
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