[May 2002 journal entry]
While reading again Martin Buber’s autobiographical fragments titled Meetings, I began making a list of ‘meetings’ in my experience that similarly endure in my memory – for instance,
- Swiping grapes (and eventually being caught by my mother) as a young boy from the A&P grocery store (managed by my parent’s close friend and my close friend’s father) (early 1960s)
- Ralph Constantine and ‘Showboat’ – my first black-skinned friends growing up (1960s)
- When I as a child would hang my head out the back window of the car to make clear my disgust with the odor of a lady we would pick up for church services (a haunting failure to ‘meet’) (early 1960s)
- The day in Latin I class when tears flowed down my cheeks as I accepted silently the reality that childhood naïveté/innocence was behind me (1964)
- Seeing a speaker I admired pinned against the foyer wall by adversaries after having given a presentation on loving those with whom we disagree (1970)
- Listening to two faculty members at a religiously fundamentalist college supported by my tradition of birth reassure a hostile crowd of constituents that after completing their doctoral programs to satisfy accrediting standards they would think/teach exactly as they did when they began their doctoral programs (1973)
- The exchange with a fellow graduate student re what to do with the results of research into critical historical scholarship (1974)
- The return from the parking lot to a place to sit on the southern edge of the Grand Canyon -- after a hurried late afternoon of picture-taking -- for the purpose of experiencing the Grand Canyon, of being there, and then noticing several other individuals silently coming one by one to sit together in ‘community’ (mid-1975)
- My first plane ride (single engine plane to Chicago in a wintry ice storm) (1974)
- Walking into what remains of Dachau Concentration Camp alone (1976)
- My first meeting and subsequent friendship with my doctoral supervisor Glenn Hinson (1976)
- Writing tutorials for Father Cyprian Davis (St. Meinrad Monastery/Seminary) (1977-78)
- Writing tutorials for Professor Barrington White at Oxford University (1978-79)
- Meeting with the Quaker community in Oxford (1979)
- My first meeting with the multiple sclerosis support group in Memphis (1980)
- Visiting a Memphis friend who was a hemophiliac dying of AIDS (early 1980s)
- The conversation my first wife and I agreed to consider our last conversation -- a conversation just a few weeks before multiple sclerosis so compromised her clarity of thought for the remainder of her life (d. 1987) that I was uncertain if she knew any longer who I was (1984)
- My first meeting and subsequent friendship/collaboration with each of the circle of physicians with whom it has been my privilege to collaborate in the promotion of a humane practice of medicine with a resolute social conscience (1980 forward)
- When the Ob/Gyn Department chair at the University of Michigan and editorial board member for Obstetrics and Gynecology covered in red ink and then routed back to us via the department secretaries a manuscript Dr. Elkins and I had prepared for publication, insuring that his critical review was known and that the thickness of our skin would be tested (1989)
- Hearing Eli Wiesel speak at Temple Israel in Memphis (late 1980s)
- Monthly meetings with UT Memphis medical students (1990-92)
- Pierre Materne and family on the train from Paris to Brugge (1993)
- The initial meeting and subsequent friendship with the Eberhard and Renate Bethge (1993)
- Walking through ‘Dirt City’ in Miami (cardboard boxes and shanties under an interstate where desperately poor individuals/families lived) (1993-97)
- Weekly discussions with the abused kids being sheltered at K-Bar-B Youth Ranch (1995-97)
- Meetings at O’Reilly’s with the LSU Ob/Gyn faculty members re “Who cares?” (1995-97)
- Our family’s ‘Table Round’ conversations (1995-2000)
- Conversations in Jellico with an early-60s engineer dying of cancer and struggling with disappointment and humiliation re he had lived his life (1998)
- The first meeting and subsequent friendship with my artist friend Dean (2000)
- Seeing poverty-stricken little children in Athens selling bananas at traffic lights . . . seeing hundreds of fugitive men in Athens crowding into a room for a free dinner (2001)
As I read Buber’s Meetings, I recalled our daughters’ humorous but insightful response – “He meets” – when they are asked, “What does your dad do?”
What is the etymology of ‘meet’? What constitutes a ‘meeting’? What criteria should be used?
