Halfway through the book I realized that Morrie must have been a colleague of my favorite professor, Jim Klee, when they were both at Brandeis in the 1960s. At least they both had Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as students. I bet they were close friends, although I don’t recall Jim, who died in September 1996, ever mentioning Morrie. They were a lot alike, those two, with a strong desire to live life to the fullest and die a good death.
A friend of mine’s dad died this morning and I’;m reminded, yet again, that nobody here gets out alive and the best we can hope for is to live fully and die well.
Reading Albom’s book brought up feelings of guilt within me. I haven’t kept in touch with many people that were important to me, including Jim. Once we moved to Minnesota I sort of dropped contact. He and his wonderful wife Lucy came to visit once or twice, as did Karen and I, but I deeply miss the long talks we used to share almost daily. You see, I took every class the man taught and toward the end of my graduate studies he let me invent individual classes.
Jim was the kind of teacher who assigned 10 - 12 books to read for each class, and he fully expected you to have read the material before you ever set foot in his classroom. He was a steady stream of consciousness but somehow everything he covered came around to being relevant to the subject matter sooner or later. The level of synchronicity and Jim’s ability to be fully in the moment still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was the educational equivalent of improvisational jazz, and when Jim was on, he could blow better than the best. And he was always on.
I miss Jim a lot today, and I can only hope to live a life half as full as his.
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