One thought on “What I Plan to Do with danielforrest.org and Index of Titles”

1. “What will people remember about me when I die? How could they look into who I was?”

   I can’t speak for “people,” Mr. Forrest. I expect you’ve touched countless people in myriad ways. Their memories and perceptions are their own, and that is as it should be. As for me, I remember you clearly and love you well.

   I’m an old guy now – not so old as you, of course, but it amuses me to see how close our ages are, how close they’ve always been. We met in your second-period English class at Rawlinson Road. I was new to the South, having grown up in southern California. I was a couple years younger than my classmates, befuddled by the rules and castes of southern society.

   You knew me as Jack Hildebrand. That name, which appears on my birth certificate, was never mine. My father was Jack Hildebrand. Maybe you remember him from his years editing the Evening Herald. I was Jack Jr., but it turns out that one Jack is more than enough for any household. I was David at home. It was my private name, my family name. Once I graduated and left Rock Hill I didn’t have a name of my own. Jack wasn’t me and David was too intimate. I’ve been J.D. ever since.

   Maybe you remember that class. John Pincelli, Robert Gross, Dunny Dunlap, Jeff Jenkins, Susan Pinochet, Sidney Goode, Cathy Haslett, Eric Webb, Gladys Huey, Kevin Boulware, Mikell Platt, Jayne Hornsby…any of those names ring a bell? I forget everything these days, but I can’t misplace the faces that appear in my imagination when I feel those names on my lips.

   English class was the one place I felt at home in those days. My father’s fourth marriage was falling apart and he had fallen in with the companions who never betrayed him, violence and drink. Lonely and rudderless as I was, I had a you-sized hole in my life. We never talked about it and maybe you never knew, but I desperately needed a role model, a grown-up man who was kind and patient and enthusiastic and caring. I might have given up becoming that kind of man, Mr. Forrest, if you hadn’t been there to show me what was possible.

   We bonded over English. I’m not sure I was the prodigy I considered myself, but I know I stood out in that small class. (A couple years later I got the state’s highest SAT score for English. When I tell people that I usually don’t mention that the state was South Carolina – ha ha.)

   I remember I had a writing assignment in your class once. We were supposed to write an essay about the future. I wrote a short story instead. Then, because it was about the future, I mounted the typed pages on black cardboard, photographed them, and had the drugstore deliver the story to me as a pack of slides. My theory was that in the future we would all read by having text projected onto screens – not a bad guess for 1972, I’m thinking. I made a cassette tape of music to accompany the story, turning the essay assignment into a 1972-era multimedia presentation. Woo hoo!

   I’ll never forget the grading sheet that came back to me after that assignment. Understandably, you focused on the gee-whiz presentation. Your only comment on the content was this: “Your writing is scintillating, of course.”

   That comment has stuck with me for the better part of a half-century: first, because I didn’t know what “scintillating” meant, and it had been a long time since anyone, even a teacher, taught me a word I didn’t know; second, because you wrote “of course.” I interpreted those words as an acknowledgment of my skill, as validation, as a kind of legitimacy.

   A year after I left Rawlinson Road I sold my first short story to a magazine. I enrolled in college as a music major after graduating from Northwestern but I dropped out to take a job editing one of the computer industry’s first magazines for enthusiasts. I’ve edited magazines ever since. I was rich for a while after selling a small company I had bought for a song and revitalized. I was slightly famous in the publishing industry and in the field of software development. I have been a house guest of Bill Gates and a friend to some of the pioneers of best practices in information technology. I figure I’ve written 3,000 articles for publication and edited at least twice that many.

   I finally went back to school. Selling my company left me estranged from my career by a noncompetition agreement, so I went to college and got my long-delayed degree in English and comparative literature at Columbia. You can say – and it is the truth – that you prepared me for the Ivy League.

   But to answer your questions…that’s not what I remember and will remember about you. “Scintillating, of course” has stuck with me, but my over-developed ego didn’t really need the praise. What I will remember, Mr. Forrest, is the side of you that you have revealed here in your account of witnessing corporal punishment for Mr. Pinson. I dared to become a decent, kind, literature-loving man, an enthusiastic, generous, exuberant person, because of your example. Your patience with slower students, the joy you took when leading a discussion, the way you took our adolescent poetry seriously…you set the bar very high. I’ve tried to live up to it ever since.

   You may consider that answer hyperbole. But you gave me “scintillating” once. It’s only fair you should be forced to accept “a very high bar” in return. We reap what we sow, Mr. Forrest, or at least I hope we do.

   Your second-period class of 1972-73 produced a 36-page literary magazine, do you recall? I had forgotten, but I fell in with a bad crowd at Facebook and Cathy Hayslett made me a pdf copy. I can email it to you if you’d like, or put a copy on my Google Drive for you to download. Let me know if you’d like to see it. The writing is cringe-worthy but it is a sincere relic of its times, I’d say.

   A couple of final thoughts before I go.

   Life hasn’t always been easy for me. It turns out that I suffer from bipolar disorder II. My variant of the disease is resistant to the drug therapy that has helped millions, so I have spent my adult life riding unpredictable ups and downs, plunged with little warning into periods of clinical depression. I think it is bipolar disorder that has made me so impulsive throughout my life. I moved abruptly from one side of the continent to another half a dozen times during my publishing career.

   After I graduated from Columbia I found myself with no classes to attend, no job…really no reason to stay in New York. I had been corresponding with a friend who lived in a small village in Serbia, and when she invited me to visit I impulsively gave away a lifetime of books (a New Jersey community college has named its bring-one, take-one lending library after me), sold my musical instruments, and bought a one-way ticket.

   My first child was born in April 2012. I was 52 years old. Little Maja is a complete joy to me. We still live in Serbia – in Belgrade now – but I hope to return with my family to the Land of Competent Dentistry before too long.

   Lest all of this strike you as fawning, I will confess that there was one way you disappointed me. Near the end of our year together you returned a paper to me with a handful of red marks indicating usage errors. It was an opinion essay, and several of my sentences began with the words “I think.” You insisted that in every case, a comma should follow the word “think” – as if “I think” were grammatically parallel to “I said,” I suppose. I protested but you were adamant.

   It’s funny what people remember, isn’t it?

   Thank you for caring, Mr. Forrest, and for demonstrating a love of stories. To the extent I was able, I grew up to be just like you.

   J.D. Hildebrand

   LikeLike

   Reply