Life, not to be wasted

History appeals to me for many reasons, not the least of which is the unending evidence it provides that civilization is the thinnest veneer over the base and vile creatures we are, especially in the aggregate.  Yet, I am not a misanthrope, because in the individuals that life and circumstance and God (or god, or fate, or however one looks at this) have brought in and out of my life lies the joy of that life.  Thus I hold friendships dearly, and stay in tough with old flames, and nurture relationships with mentors, even when the immediate need for that mentoring had long dissipated. 

Last weekend one of those mentors died, in a single-car wreck on I95 in South Carolina.  Mark Finlay was a professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University, where I worked for two years.  It was my first position after completing my doctorate.  It wasn't the best job, a heavy teaching load, located not in Savannah at the main campus, but at a branch campus location shared with an unemployment office out in the sticks (literally). 

Combined with the parsimonious Georgia legislature's attitude toward spending on higher education (summarized as follows: don't spend money on them colleges, especially on degrees that are all about thinking just makes liberals who won't work for peanuts) it was a rough two years spent worrying about when the campus might be closed (it was briefly), and when I might have the opportunity to compete for a tenure-track position (the answer was never).  I knew all of this going in, but one of the many reasons I accepted the position (I had another offer), was that when I met Mark during my interviews it was clear that he had read my file, carefully and fully even though, because he was the assistant Dean, he couldn't participate in the department's vote (a quirk of faculty governance, a topic for another time).  Later that spring, he made a point of coming to hear a paper that I presented at the Agricultural History Conference.

He worked hard to acclimate me to the realities of working at a teaching institution, and fully supported my efforts to find another position when it became clear there was little hope for advancement at Armstrong.  He trusted me as a scholar to ask me to complete some research for a project upon which he was working that required perusing records in Wyoming, and he was willing to write a letter on my behalf when I came up for retention at my current institution.  Yet he was not just a good-time charlie, he pushed me on my scholarship, and my teaching, and made it clear that the academic life is one of hard labor, and often small rewards, but part of a grand tradition.  He took life seriously (and that meant being serious, but also taking fun, seriously).