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I suppose it is presumptuous to think about “your legacy” at the comparatively tender age of 72. Aren’t legacies supposed to be somehow attached to long-lived legends? To GOATS? I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to figure that GOAT stood for Greatest Of All Time, not a rather clueless ruminant. I still have trouble with that notion. Seems to fly in the face of another sports “truism” that - “all records are mean to be broken.” Still, if one is to have a “legacy” shouldn’t you be a legend of some sort? I have trouble seeing myself as a legend. I don’t suppose I can claim that status just because John Legend went to my high school? Go Panthers! Then again if you cut the categories fine enough, everyone can be a GOAT! I played the “boy” in the Wittenberg College production of the Mary Chase play, “Mrs. McThing” when I was about 6 or 7 years old 1955? '56? I think I was probably the youngest, and most likely the only, kid to have played that role, that year, at that college - and hence by those specific criteria - I am the GOAT! But I digress as is my wont.
The discordancy that currently confuses me is a kind of Dr. Doolittle Pushmi-Pullyu consideration of the notion of a legacy. Being a 72 year-old retired college professor who taught literally thousands of students over some 40 years in the classroom, I feel somewhat entitled to attempt to draw some conclusions while looking back over specific experiences with that cadre of students. Then I remember that my father was a retired college professor who taught thousands of students over many more years, and lived to be 100. Looking backward from 72, in that context, any claim to a legacy seems both morbid and self-indulgent, ignoring as it does, the 28 years that awaited my father at this age. ‘Tis a puzzlement! Which end is the front of a Pushmi-Pullyu? Does one head look ahead to legacy, the other head gazing behind? And which is which?
Then I remembered my lifelong friend Dan’s thoughts on a related but somehow similar notion. He has lived most of his adult life in the DC area. Which, as we have recently been made painfully aware, is an often exciting locale. Years ago, during a visit to the area we were headed off to The National Museum of Art, and he remarked on the pleasure he derived from visiting the many “musey-rooms” in the area. It is a delightful phrase and one that has stuck with me. I don’t recall if I ever asked him if how and why he came to that particular descriptor, but he is here on the Wall and may correct me if I am completely of base.
My thought is that any museum worth its salt has a bunch of rooms - sort of a riff on the "in my museum there are many rooms" kind of thing. And it is not an unreasonable stretch to presume that each of those rooms is the province of a particular muse. The ancients seem to follow that notion. Different temples for different gods, right? Athena, Zeus, Apollo, all the biggies had their own temple right? OK, now stick with me here. One's legacy is a many-roomed affair. Each Legacy Musey Room is unique to the Muse that inspired the works therein and should be seen through its own lenses.
Some legacy musey rooms are best experienced by looking backward at experiences that are well and truly over - like my life as a college professor. Been there. Done that. Not going back. Some cherished and treasured experiences in that particular Legacy Musey Room. Though many, I must admit, are drawn from a "university" that was already a thing of the past even pre-COVID. Others were even more poignant as I saw that university I loved receding in the face of contemporary realities and demands. Other legacy musey rooms peer into less precisely defined spaces of my life. My lifelong obsession with doodling eventually lead to a one man show of "doodles made big" - called Art; My Second Cousin Once Removed - which was a big hit in the coffeeshop where it was staged - but then so was the coffee. I have some hope that that particular legacy musey room might have some forward looking potential now that I am retired.
But I am discovering that even in retirement Legacy Musey Rooms have to compete for space. There are other muses out there that do not simply go away because you no longer have a "job," an "office," in truth, a private space to which you can disappear for several hours every day. The Family Legacy Musey Room is always in flux, increased by one just today as daughter Emily and her husband Jeremy presented us with my new granddaughter, Madison Ruth Kaplan! The Schrag Wall Legacy Musey Room contains prose, poetry and images which stretch back to the last millennium and will run out into the future as long as I can manage. Perhaps, The Returning to Sculpture Legacy Musey Room? Maybe. And, lord willing, the Life After Covid Legacy Room. Enough to twist any self-respecting Pushmi-Pullyu into knots.
So that's my thought on my legacy. You will note that the notion of Legacy Musey Rooms conveniently places most final thoughts on any legacy itself conveniently in the future. The exception, of course, being any legacy attached to my years in the classroom. And rightly so, as I have no legitimate voice in that discussion. Only the students who sat in those classrooms can make that determination - however, if I could make a suggestion, I feel that "teaching live in a classroom" was a totally different experience than "teaching to a camera." Which, for me, brings me to the thought that those might be two completely different realities - answering, perhaps, to entirely different muses?
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