Mr. Kerwin’s name has been mentioned here before. He was one of my high school English teachers. I can’t say who my “favorite” teacher was - frankly, I don’t remember all of them (which is a data point in itself) - but Bill Kerwin is certainly in the top three.
Bill wrote and published a novel. Big Sleep Boogie is a fun bit of sci-fi, written in the style of old-timey private dick novels…but set in the afterlife. I bought it, I read it, I liked it. I gave it a review on Amazon. I won’t flog it any further here other than to say it’s an entertaining (and short) read and worth your time if you’re into that sort of thing. (Trebly so if you happen to be from Columbus, Ohio.)
Fast-forward a couple of years, to around a month ago.
I reached out to Bill on Facebook. I asked if maybe we could get some lunch or breakfast some time and catch up a bit. I thought about inviting him over to sit on my front porch (so I wouldn’t have to go anywhere), but since I was the one asking and I hadn’t seen him in 20 years I figured meeting up at a restaurant “my treat” was a more reasonable opening gambit. After a bit of back-and-forth on logistics we sorted a date and time; we decided to forego a meal in favor of sitting on his front porch (so he wouldn’t have to go anywhere).
My man.
As that date and time approached I actually started to get a bit…nervous? Or something. “Never meet your heroes” is close to the mark, but doesn’t quite describe what the thing was. Some of it had to do with protocol. For instance, I had a whole-ass conversation with more than one person about whether I was going to call him “Mr. Kerwin” or “Bill”. General consensus was “You’re going to call him ‘Mr. Kerwin’, and he’s going to say ‘Naw, please, call me Bill’, and that’ll be that.”
I reckon we’ve all seen too many sitcoms.
Anyhow, when the time came I had a beer to take the edge off and walked on over (as it turns out his place is only about a half mile from mine - bonus!) … and I needn’t have had any nerves about the thing at all, or at least not for any of the reasons that I didn’t quite understand to begin with. We just sat and whiled away a couple of hours talking. We covered a lot of ground. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what we didn’t talk about. Politics, religion/spirituality, what’s going on in the neighborhood, kids, careers, history and potential futures…and, of course, books. The man is intimidatingly literate, as is an English teacher’s wont.
In short, it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
If you take nothing else away from this post, it should probably be this: Spending time talking to human beings for the sole purpose of talking to human beings is a worthwhile pursuit.
Dear Reader: I’m not suggesting that you should look up every teacher you’ve ever had and go invading their respective front porches. That’s probably creepy. …but if you should happen to have an opportunity like I described above then you should take it.