{"id":2735,"date":"2016-08-18T20:22:13","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T20:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=2735"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:56:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:56:32","slug":"of-birdhouses-quilts-and-professor-don-baker-h57","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2016\/08\/18\/of-birdhouses-quilts-and-professor-don-baker-h57\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Birdhouses, Quilts, and Professor Don Baker H\u201957"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week ago last Thursday I returned to campus after lunch to find a demolition machine tearing down the Baker House.<\/p>\n

I was startled, but the decision makes practical sense. Students have plenty of new, excellent housing, more suitable than these old houses. The new lodges and halls are even named after some of our finest teachers\u2014Williams Hall, Butler Lodge, Rogge Hall.<\/p>\n

And only a few of us\u00a0ever called 16 Harry Freedman Place \u201cBaker House.\u201d A small group in\u00a0Communications dubbed it so in the late 1990s when we moved into the place in for a year and found out it had been the home of Professor of English Donald Baker.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0would be Donald Whitelaw Baker H\u201957, the College Poet. The man Professor Bill Placher \u201970 called \u201cthe best reader of poetry I\u2019ve ever heard,\u201d who Professor Vic Powell H\u201955 called \u201ca man of great moral courage,\u201d who Professor Bert Stern H\u201962 said \u201clived in honest language in a world where language was every day more heavily enshrouded in lies.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a home of legendary faculty parties, too.<\/p>\n

And this was the guy who penned the College\u2019s first mission statement\u00a0after a faculty meeting in 1972.<\/p>\n

I learned more about him from his friends when Professor Marc Hudson hosted a memorial tribute to Don\u00a0in the winter of 2004. And I learned more, too, about that first Wabash mission statement, which the poet\u00a0penned as a \u201cstatement of purpose,\u201d saying that a Wabash education prepares students \u201cto judge thoughtfully, act effectively, and live humanely in a difficult world.”<\/p>\n

The College tweaked that statement a bit in the 1990s, and Professor Hall Peebles H\u201963 wasn’t keen on the\u00a0change: \u201cI think something is missing by removing Don’s final part of that line, \u2018to live humanely in a difficult world.’ Because the wonder of Don Baker is that he knew damned well this is a very difficult world, but he didn’t give in to it; he fought it. And he knew that if you don’t give in to it, you can make it a little better. It’s difficult, but darn it all, it can be a better world. Don Baker made the world, and Wabash, a better place.”<\/p>\n

Don\u2019s memorial tribute was attended by his daughter, Alison Baker Rilling, a writer herself who told me more about the house and what it was like growing up there, and at Wabash, in the 1960s. She told me about a birdhouse she made and decorated and attached to the back porch and inscribed with the name \u201cJ. Wren.\u201d After she left I took a closer look at that porch and saw that J. Wren\u2019s house was still there, so I took a picture and emailed it to Alison.<\/p>\n

And every time I\u2019ve passed it I\u2019ve thought of Alison, her father, and those people at that tribute\u2014Placher, Powell, Peebles, Stern, Hudson, Herzog\u2014whose friendships helped make\u00a0my life at Wabash\u00a0the wonder and awakening it has been.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know exactly<\/strong> how an old birdhouse becomes such a touchstone, but I do know this has been a summer of losses\u2014the MXI\u2019s father, Horace Turner H\u201976; Nancy Doemel H\u201991, who re-shaped philanthropy here; the one-and-only Don Herring H\u201984; and gentleman Jim Smith H\u201950, among them. Losses I could do nothing about but mourn.<\/p>\n

\"houseBut\u00a0when I saw the demolition machine\u2019s maw hanging over the old Baker House, I knew I could do\u00a0something. I grabbed my camera for one last photo, then realized that alerting someone to the fact their childhood home has been destroyed and sending photos would be more torture than gift.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0I called out over the crunch and growl of the machine to a young man in an orange vest. When he came over, I told him about the birdhouse, how I thought it\u2019s maker would appreciate having it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny chance you could stop things for just a second and get it for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"a“Sure,” was all he said,\u00a0raising his hand to the machine operator, calling out for him to stop, pointing to the back porch. Then he clambered over the rubble, pulled down the birdhouse and cradled it in both hands. He was smiling as brought it back to me.<\/p>\n

I am old enough that small kindnesses move me; I choked up a little trying to thank him.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, just glad we could get it for her,\u201d the young man said.<\/p>\n

Back in my office I photographed J. Wren\u2019s abode and sent the pictures to the most recent email address I had for Alison, hoping she\u2019d get them.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, Alison, being a writer, replied with a gift of her own:<\/p>\n

Memory is such a weird and treacherous thing\u2014remembering standing up on the brown wooden railing at that back door to peer into J. Wren’s doorway brings back the damp odor of the basement down those steps, the cool dark dankness, the cave crickets leaping out at you, the washing machine\u00a0(it was old and in need of repair which would have been expensive, so since my mother was afraid of bats and cave crickets, my father would go down to do the laundry and stand there leaning against the machine, reading, manually changing the cycles as each one finished).
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The hedge of Viburnum\u00a0<\/em>trilobum. The Trippets’ ivy-covered wall. The little white gate. Old Mrs. Trippet’s black-and-white spaniels\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have a quilt<\/strong> in my office designed, pieced, and sewn by Nancy Doemel, one of her last works. It\u2019s called \u201cChurn Dash Deconstructed,\u201d and Nancy made it using a method called \u201cfree piecing.\u201d One side is a typical quilt\u2014multiple pieces of printed fabric, images of eggs, butterflies, plants, and leaves all sewn together. This is actually the back of the quilt. Most of the front is a single color except for one image\u2014a butterfly\u2014and a few other pieces sewn in the old Churn Dash design. It\u2019s a remnant from the other side\u2014what the artist deemed the essential image, along with the pattern that holds it all together.<\/p>\n

A trace\u00a0of the quilt\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Nancy at her most creative, too, breaking out of set patterns to quietly re-define herself, just as she did in her life after Wabash. I look at that quilt and hear her excitedly walking me through the decision making process.<\/p>\n

\"house<\/p>\n

When I first got it I showed it to Wabash Magazine<\/em> designer Becky Wendt, and she understood it immediately. A remnant. This is what we do in our work here. \u201cSew\u201d\u2014in a story, a photograph, a quote, even a birdhouse\u2014some essential piece of a person, or a moment, an idea, before they go away. To remember. To somehow continue the conversation.<\/p>\n

It is not enough.<\/p>\n

When we heard last weekend the terrible news that sophomore Luke Borinstein had been killed in an airplane accident only days after returning from Global Health work in Peru, we scrambled for images and quotes. We found a few. But Luke had before him as many years as most of the friends we\u2019ve lost this summer had behind them. No photograph, word, or artifact can be of much consolation to his classmates, teachers, or his brothers.<\/p>\n

It is never\u00a0enough.<\/p>\n

But it is something we can do\u2014an alternative,\u00a0if not an antidote, to despair. Perhaps us at our most human.<\/p>\n

Poets do this work best. Don Baker, whose words live on though his life and house are gone, gets at it here in one of his last poems.<\/p>\n


\nA Branch of Beach Plum<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most days I walk the old track under the pines
\nand over the dunes to the beach.
\nI have chosen for you the bend in the path
\nwhere a thicket of beach plum survives the backhoes,
\nwhere at noon in our season the air
\nused to be heavy with the smell of blossoms.
\nThis morning I walked on the brown needles
\nas gently as I could so that no abrupt
\ngesture would temper the music of the warblers
\nin the spruce. Returning, I broke off
\na branch of beach plum and carried it home.
\nNow it rises from the blue vase on the mantel,
\nthe flowers, fragile and pink, beginning to wither,
\none broken twig oozing a clear drop.
\nYes, that is where I should like to meet you,
\nhalfway between home and the shore, knowing
\nthat back there are kitchen and books and bedroom,
\na house full of lives and living,
\nand, not far ahead, the comforting sea.<\/p>\n

\u2014Donald W. Baker<\/p>\n

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