Frederick (Rick) Griffiths – 50th Reunion Essay

Frederick (Rick) Griffiths

21 Gray St.

Amherst, Massachusetts 01002

ftgriffiths@amherst.edu

Education: MA Harvard (1972); PhD Harvard (1974)

Career: Amherst College (1972- ): Class of 1880 Professor of Greek, Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies; Associate Dean of the Faculty (2003–08 & 2011–13)

Avocations: Kulcha travel; Dinosaur Groupie

College: Trumbull

Hullo, hullo, across the Eli ages!

I’m honored now to speak amid these pages—

Okay, not honored.

More like compliant

Because too passive for defiant

When alma mater bids disclose our stories

And fleeting time reminds, “Memento Mory’s!”

For mater surely needs one more dispatch

Snatched from the thick professor patch:

Greek master in a tiny ivied town

Where Emily D. lurks four doors down.

But we don’t talk. We’re both aloof.

She prays with bated faith. I wait for proof.

At work I perch and search just up two floors

From bones and tracks of sundry dinosaurs.

Above the earth museum I’ve lately found

My bony neighbors most profound:

“Your toasty Holocene is likely short.

Earth feeds, recedes, and stops. We are her sport.

All things will come to those who wait.

Relax! The payoff’s when they excavate.”

Sweet words to me a living relic (classics)—

But pale male Yale? That’s Jurassic!

Yes, kids. But few of us completely hoped

To live this way, instead elitely coped

And marched for peace (though this will trouble you)

With best intent a year behind George W.

Hip as we were, tuned in and mobilized,

How quickly sixties Yale got fossilized.

A dicey time with nothing certain

But that we’d bear the Yale Man’s Burden.

As Inky’s guys we budged the door a crack

Till lux poured in to show the missing black.

Yes, girls were known (with “gender” yet uncalled);

The group bromance remained not yet Stonewalled.

The Modern hit the town with clumsy shocks

To canyon streets with rugged concrete blocks.

A learned liberal core, still of the feudalest,

Brought teaching, like the Breurers, brutalist—

A precious, ancient, stern survival.

Yet, decades later have I seen its rival?

At least the teaching stirred the mental churn

To face how much in life we would unlearn.

But we were young. How could we know?

Yalesplaining was the first to go.

And though our years bring minor shrivelege

We’ve made it through with splendid privilege.

I’m planted still in Amherst, though yet to bloom.

“Let go the bud,” says Em, “and hear the room.”

“No, naught is new,” say bones, “beneath the sun.

You’re just one meteor from being done.”

To mater debts and doubts are owed.

We reap the yield and tares that they once sowed.

Un-Yaled, remote, is this apology?

Downpayment on necrology?

Unclear. Yet cheers to all you 69ers.

Let’s all stay blue down to our diaper liners.