It’s taken me a long time to speak of my father. Oh, I know he has appeared briefly in one sketch or another–in this description of his lab, in that story of a church, in a piece about a wildflower field, and in still another scene as Santa Claus. He’s been there, but I have not really told of him. I’m not sure I can now. I can’t seem to fit him on my page. There is that limitation when we try to define our heroes; no single word suits, no page holds heroic dimensions.
If I were allowed only one chance to use only one word to describe him and get it right, I would have to choose “teacher.” Most who read this will remember him within that definition–teacher, professor, mentor–standing at the front of the classroom, darkly handsome, describing with words and cigarette-stained hands such scientific phenomena as oogenesis, epiboly, the particular alignment of the dogfish’s vertebrae, the cat’s comparative anatomy, the pulsing swim of coelenterates, the chambers of the ancient nautilus, and the perdurable twisting ladder of the code-bearing helix that ultimately defines us all.
Some will see him yet at the sea’s edge in swim trunks and battered tennis shoes, holding a precious Upogebia delicately in his thick hands, describing to a spellbound group of sunburned, briny students the little burrowing crab’s unique contribution to the world of marine invertebrates. Or maybe the memory comes of him standing midstream on the rocky bottom of Mary’s Creek, leading his disciples in a search for the myriad forms of insect larvae to which that Trinity tributary played host, or pulling a plankton net through the still pond waters of Fort Worth’s Botanical Gardens, seeking unseen hydra, amoebas, and other minute forms to be discovered only with a microscope’s enhanced eye.
His classrooms were many, his subject vast–life in all its forms, its habitats, and its manifestations. Although his primary responsibility at TCU was preparing young people to enter the healing professions, marine invertebrate biology was his particular love, and he headed for a coastline at every opportunity, usually with an entourage of family, a few students, or sometimes whole classes. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin Town, the tune he played gathered followers, and he led them along the beach, into mud flats, aboard shrimping boats, and onto the channel jetties, where he climbed among the riprap, revealing the secret places where chitons cling and sea urchins dwell, and where the sea anemone waves its soft tentacle-arms. He could and would hold court anywhere–even a handball court where, with a characteristic grin, he taught much younger, more athletic challengers that youth and arrogance were no substitutes for experience and proficiency.
He was not an “easy” teacher, nor was he an inflexible perfectionist, but when you left his tutelage, if nothing else, you had learned to at least strive toward precision. And if the class were Comparative Anatomy and you passed, you might have a reasonable chance of getting through Mr. Hogan’s Organic Chemistry, too. It was a catch-phrase of the time that pre-meds making it to their senior year had passed through “Hogan, Hewatt, and Hell.” He was a strict disciplinarian in the home and the classroom, firm but never harsh. He was always encouraging, but not falsely so, and the hopes of many pre-med aspirants were dashed, no doubt, when he told them that they would be wise to choose another profession, that his recommendation was required to advance further and, based on their performance, he could not give it.
Although his was an unmistakably scientific mind, requiring analysis and proof–he called it the “corpus delicti”–from his own children as well as his students before making positive observations or categorical statements, there was also a sensibility that put some things beyond explanation, and often he would simply say, again with that grin, “That’s the nature of the beast” and let it go at that.
It wasn’t so much what he taught, as how he taught.
Through his own enthusiasm to know, he made others want to know. Through his own wondering, we were taught to wonder. By his own example, he led others to inquire, to examine, and to sense.
As a little girl sitting in his lap, I learned the sounds of our language and the rhythms and visions poets could make with them, as he read “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” “The Highwayman,” “Gunga Din,” and the English-authored Texas poem, his favorite, “Lasca.” He often used poetry in his classes to illustrate his teachings. Who among his former students of Invertebrate Zoology has forgotten his reading of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ode to the ship of pearl, “The Chambered Nautilus”? With the aid of a wonderful brass telescope, he could pluck magic out of a still summer night and hand it in the form of the moon, the planets, and the stars, to a group of rapt neighborhood children, who thought, like I, that my daddy knew a lot about most things, and just about all there was to know on the subject of worlds beyond the one on which we stood.
Sometimes as I walk on the campus, I am aware of how much I miss his presence here; sometimes someone else’s gait or particular manner will throw me out of the present back into the past of that same place, and I all but speak before I realize it’s now, not then, it’s you, not him. Sometimes when I enter the Winton-Scott science building where he had an office, the familiar smells that permeate the walls of science buildings everywhere prompt a momentary anticipation of seeing him still there, adjusting the air pressure in a saline tank, laying out a round-robin test on the black-topped laboratory tables, or moving among his proteges in an anatomy class, patiently telling, showing, instructing, often cajoling, often laughing. And sometimes as the memories return, I smile and laugh at the good that was mine, and then I cry, because I want it back. He was one of those individuals, rare now it seems, whose clear vision focuses ours, whose wisdom we want to tap, and who ought to be allowed to stay around longer to help us think.
Had I been lover, wife, colleague, friend, I might have been more critical of the flaws (they were only eccentricities) that he had, given that he was, after all, one of us. But there is an insurmountable distance, when the relationship is right, between father and daughter, made of hero-worship, respect, awe, a tentative idolatry on the daughter’s part, and a desire, the obligation to be the hero on the father’s part that precludes a peer-like regard. The daughter is forever in the posture of looking up and the father of looking down, seldom across. The father teaches, the daughter learns, and if the daughter is lucky, she has a hero to look up to and such a teacher as mine.
©1989 Joan Hewatt Swaim