Robert Morgan

Saw old friend Bob Morgan last Thursday night for the first time since the last visit I made to his and his wife’s farm in Ithaca. That visit back in 2002 (I believe) was one born from a journey made to see the last of the Ithaca urban family leave Cornell on their own career paths. Donna was packing up to go back to Manhattan; Paul, not long after, would be taking a temporary teaching position at Wake Forrest. Everyone else had already packed up and left Ithaca years before.

As we drove to Jacksonville Thursday evening, I told E of Bob’s career, a solid career as a poet and fiction writer; a career that became even more solid after a phone call from a talk show host in Chicago, praising his latest book (at the time), and asking him to please come and visit her book club. When Oprah Winfrey picks your book to be her book club selection of the month, you’d suspect that your life would change in very drastic ways. Not so with Bob when Gap Creek, the fictionalized account of his grandmother’s life, was picked. Bob was older then, held a firmly established position in the English department at Cornell University, had at least eight books of poetry under his belt, and probably as many works of fiction, too. He and wife Nancy didn’t really need anything else that money could buy, except a farm closer to the university, a farm that turned out to be very similar to the farm they had lived in before, a place where you could sit Sunday evenings and eat, drink and listen to Bob spin yarns. Bob had a habit of crossing his legs when he spoke, and as he spoke, he would begin a stirring motion with the top leg. It was as if he were stirring up the words for his stories with that leg, gettin’ a good momentum on them so they would tumble out of his mouth together in the most beautiful sentences. When Bob spoke, you could feel yourself becoming mesmerized, all else would fade away except for the sound of his voice, and the stirring of his leg…

We were not disappointed with Bob’s talk. He had been invited to JSU’s Houston Cole Library by the Friends of the Library, and he spoke on his latest biography, Boone. As he began to speak to the audience, the sound of his voice again mesmerized me, all else faded away, and although he was standing at a podium with one leg casually crossed over the other, the top leg began what was most certainly a noticeable stirring…

At the closing of the talk, as the audience broke out of Bob’s spell, I looked over at E to see his reaction. His paraphrased words were that he had become so engrossed in what Bob was saying, that when he snapped out of the spell, his hand automatically went to his chin for fear that he had been drooling. And as we slipped down the eleven flights of stairs to avoid the overcrowded elevators, E asked if I had noticed what Bob’s leg was doing during the talk…

Reading: Grapes of Wrath
Listening to: Cookin’ & Workin’ with Miles Davis