Yes, he’s served as our freshman-studies adviser. He’s been our round-the-clock shoulder to cry on. “Meadows” is known for taking upset girls on short car rides all over town for long sensible talks. No hysterics ever seem to scare him off completely. It’s almost disappointing, isn’t it, girls! Those of us who have imposed on him for help are never left feeling either obliged or even all that exposed. He is always telling us, like Terence, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” … or, “I am a human, I find nothing human foreign to me.” The truth is, Professor C. M. Delman has become for some of us the Ultimate Good Father. And he has offered this to wave on wave of incoming students. Even after many decades, to have “worked with Meadows” still truly means something!

So, Sisters, this sorority firmly binds us all across misty time. Until we met this particular example, many of us kids of divorce believed “a Good Dad” to be some species like the Unicorn. Without Meadows Delman and his follow-up phone calls, the joke gifts and perfect Latin quotations, we never would have known what a Good Father even looked like!

So thank you, Professor Delman, from almost a quarter century, from all eleven hundred eighty one of your lucky handpicked ‘daughters’!

VII.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.

James 5:16

I usually hate those films and books that end by stating where everyone landed up and what everyone became professionally. But here I’m moved to close by assembling such a list myself.

Doc Richard Dix, young to be a victim of prostate cancer, still made erotic trouble even in Intensive Care. They’d assigned him older and ever-plainer female nurses. But, using his last strength, Dix still grabbed their asses. Administrators finally resorted to a tall black orderly, I mean a male one. Dix’s reaction to this helper’s backside has not been recorded. But I felt nothing, less than that, on hearing news of Dr. Richard Dix’s death via his own irradiated, overactive generative organs. The Falls Herald Traveler claimed he’d perished “surrounded by his loving family,” all nine accredited children, their spouses, and his wife of thirty-one years.

Some anonymous local person with a long memory, my current mailing address (and a fairly mean sense of fun) sent me the full-page hometown obituary. The Hollywood glamour portrait of Dix was marked “File photo. Circa 1955.” Bethany, our house’s major movie-lover, claimed, for what it’s worth, that Dix looked like a mix of Lex Barker, Joel McCrea, and the crazed lip-curling young Richard Wid-mark. “A major dish,” she, the toughest of critics, announced.

Community Leader Fallen, Friend to Falls’s Animals, Father, and Beloved “Character” Dead at Fifty-One

That takes care of him.

Now on to my mother. Somehow, the Paradigm’s dedication let me see how much I’d really worked to be parental. I’d spent the last forty years repaying Clyde for those first eight with him—with Clyde and his wife.