Gordon

The name is Gordon Harper, a friend at ’79 (Scalia of the Supreme Court in yesterdays column was also ’79) who died Feb. 8. Diagnosed with leukemia September, he expected to end his existence within a year. He lasted four months.

This reflection is not about the historic particulars of Gordon, spacetime occupied and roles played. Nor how he affected other people (he did, many), including his supportive wife Roxane who stayed in the background. As a group facilitator, like his colleague Joe Slicker who at 96 finally drew the curtain also this week, he worked with individuals and groups to assist articulate vision, identify contradictions, push practical proposals, and decide on a course of action, after a consensus for a group and cognitive discourse for an individual.

I remember Gordon ’77 as a staff member in the HDTI (Human Development Training Institute) in India, Nava Gram Prayas, to create new communities. In the plateau of Maharashtra outside of Aurangabad where the relics of history are carved in the Ellora and Ajanta caves, I journeyed to learn of their construct only to find out that whatever they had on their plates emerged collegially from heads butting against each other around a table, that conceptually, I was already on the ground with the methodology and material.

Gordon took the four-year BA program of his academic background and constructed University 13, a 13-week design. A movement waited to be triggered in India, and we had a generic construct ready to be filled with flesh and blood.The construct got transformed into the HDTI. In the same fashion, I returned to the Philippines with the construct to “just do it.”

I did, on Mactan Island among in Sudtonggan village, with the Dick and Linda Alton family and resident staff. Gordon assisted the HDP, a Human Development Project already on the ground with the language of the new glocality for participants. Success in numerical achievement, or awards from the Rotary Club, or recognition from the Chamber of Commerce, was not the agenda. In Maliwada onward, as far as career went, I no longer had any. I learned to just go do whatever I knew needed to be done, to ignore the judgment, critique, and expectation of society and history, but work in and through them.

We called it HDTS, a school targeting 24 villages in Mactan, built a training school in Sudtonggan and invited villages around Langub HDP north of Davao City in Mindanao, by a geo-thermal plant in Camarines Sur, and oil drilling in Palawan.

I told time by watching Gordon mix his 5-pm gin-and-tonic, sniffing the waft of a cherry smelling pipe as he lit up in the afternoon. A Baptist minister, I never understood how he could get away with his habits (I was an ordained Methodist cleric) until I realized that not all Baptists were created equal! Nor Methodists for that matter! Gordon was a pedagogue par excellence. I sat under the smell of his smokes while he kept his gin-tonic routine to himself without encouraging others to join him.

Since Gordon announced his leukemia (with Scalia and Slicker), I reflected about the facticity of my aging. At 70, I turned into a “clutch,” dropping things on the floor, finding it difficult to get back up again. The leg calves cramp at night; I make a restroom run several times before sunrise. Brain cells freeze on recall.

I taught SVES six graders in the previous decade; recognize former students but don’t remember names. Many staff offices in the Community College where I go to arrange to teach a few courses for the next term. Familiar but older face behind a desk invariably greets me, smiling like it was only yesterday when they came to elementary school.

I get into the car to drive to the store, and when I get there, I forgot what it was that I drove there for. I connect to the Internet and do not remember what email I needed to send. I am busy at my dwelling everyday, with many indications of things that got started but nothing accomplished at the end of the day.

I picture Gordon nodding his head on all of these, raising a twitch-like lift on one side of his mouth, finger his goatee without letting on that he probably went through this part of aging in the last ten years. Like Gandhi, he had playfulness about him on life’s serious matters.

We won’t go into “eternity” as I don’t think Gordon delved into that much. One of my students last year asked, “Are you an atheist?”after my spiel on the “here-and-now”; another responded: “You’ve not been listening. He just wants everyone to know he is totally responsible for the 86 years of his existence.”

I imagine how Gordon spent his last moments. He grimaced at the terminus, welcomed the friend. The end cometh, it says. Gordon lived his life. The review of its fullness is finished, outrospection done, he introspects. With a beatific smile plastered on his face, he dies his death. As the old metaphor exuded: Glory, Hallelujah, praise be! To Scalia, Slicker, and Gordon.