March 31, 2021
[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Gunsmoke episodes (as of April 27, 1958), go listen to “Squaw.” Then come back here!]
Email to Colleague Suzanne Lee, April 8, 2016
| From: Angelo Bonadonna <bonadonna@sxu.edu> Subject: Yesterday’s Encounter Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2016 08:53:11 -0500 To: Suzanne Lee <slee@sxu.edu> Hi, Suzanne—it was good seeing you not once, but twice, yesterday! I want to share with you a little outcome of our first encounter yesterday. Each week with my freshman writing class, I engage in an exercise I call SSW—silent sustained writing (the sibling of SSR). Yesterday when we met, I was on my way to class, and so you made an appearance in my lead-in to my writing session, which I’ve entitled “Miraculous Intrusions of the Day.” The whole thing brings me a big smile (and some tears as you’ll see if you read on), and I’d like to share it with you. Thank you for being part of the miracles in my life. Let me know if you want me to track down and send you an MP3 of the Gunsmoke episode in question. :) The writing is not complete or particularly polished, but it does, at the end, touch on grief, and attempts to admire a simple and genuine portrayal of it in the Gunsmoke program. On that level, I want to say again, I’m sorry for […] the sadness around much of our experience these days. But anyway—it was nice seeing you! —Angelo |
Here’s the SSW I attached to Suzanne’s emaill:
| Miraculous Intrusions of the Day April 7, 2016: So much happens in a day that is unexpected. I never would have guessed that I’d be telling Suzanne Lee about George Bahumas running up to me from behind and knocking me down—and how, (at least for the surprise factor), she reminded me of him, though as she said, she hoped there’d be a different outcome than the two of us fighting in the grass. [Comment from 2021: The fight with George Bahumas, (my oldest childhood friend), was the only real, Western-style, fist fight of my life. This was true in 2016, and, somewhat surprisingly, it is still true in 2021, given the the events of the past 5 years at SXU.] But my surprise conversation with Suzanne is not what I planned to share today. I came to write about another unexpected miraculous intrusion of the day, the Gunsmoke episode, “Squaw,” that I heard on the Old Time Radio station during my morning commute. It caught me by surprise. I’ve never been a Gunsmoke fan, though the show does have some powerful claims on me. The TV version was a favorite of my mother, and I have such warm, simple memories of her watching the show in the basement (?) while she cooked. I have such a devotion to Bonanza, and I think some of the qualities of that show correlate, obviously, to Gunsmoke. Then there’s William Conrad, the great radio actor, maybe the greatest radio voice of all time, but someone destined to become TV’s “Cannon”—such a step down from the Matt Dillon he wanted to play on TV, after giving life to the role on radio. All these, and other, ideas are swirling as I was driving down this morning, listening to “Squaw.” By the end of the show, the tears are welling up in my eyes, unexpectedly. And the tears well up now as I write this. Why? I’m reminded of King Lear, and the way Shakespeare was able to create a genre—the family drama—a category of experience so powerful, so unique, so important—and so likely to be neglected without the writing and art form, as propelled by a great innovator and artist. King Lear is a tragedy—not of civic matters, or personal ambitions, or tempestuous romances—but rather of parents and children, and their inability to figure out life’s complex ways of putting us in simple, necessary, and fundamental relationships. “Squaw” told of a family conflict, father and son, culture and culture, boy and mother, boy and step-mother—and on all levels, from Freudian sexual motivations, to anthropological confusions, to race relations, to 1950s mores, to fairy tale romances, to current xenophobias, and many swirling dynamics in between—the story strikes a chord. The boy’s father has remarried—to a Navajo squaw, and the boy is now acting out, getting into bar fights in Dodge. So Matt gets involved, and he and Chester make a visit to the boy’s father. It turns out that the father has married this woman according to Indian custom (where the man “purchases” the woman from the father; note to self: really? is there any accuracy to this thread? is this a case of 1950s racism? but that’s another concern), but he has not married her legally. The boy is living in the shame of being a “squaw man.” His father has disgraced him. The woman is the same age as the boy. So there’s also the narrative of the dirty old man living with the young Indian woman. And one suspects the boy’s attraction to his step-mother causes no little stir to the mix of emotions—the strong hateful emotions he feels towards his new mother. So Matt and Chester make their trip. They find a woman there—both very beautiful and young, and they further find that, though she can barely speak English, and the father can barely speak Navajo—the marriage is one of genuine love. Kudos to the narrative art of the writers—to “condense” that effect, that impression, in a few verbal exchanges. But the power and authenticity of the love come across to us after all these years and differences, and the woman, in her broken English expresses hope that Matt and Chester will come again—and be fed by her. The sense of hospitality—and the promise of family life is complete in the very brief scene. Matt prevails on the man to come into town on Saturday to have a legal marriage performed. This will help alleviate the son’s angst—or part of it—or so Matt hopes. But just what is the nature of the son’s problem? He is very deluded, it seems, about his own motivation—and near the story’s end, after all the horrible tragedy of the family drama has unfolded, Matt Dillon makes the observation about what the son thinks was his motivation. Matt calls out his rationalization explicitly. In doing so, he suggests that the boy was struggling with a mix of perturbed, dark, swirling confusions—about sexual desire, cultural bigotry, family loyalties, the father-kill motive, self-hatred, an Oedipal relationship with his birth mother, and a violence born out of frustrations of efficacy. So many ideas here—but the tears, I’m sure, stemmed from some simplicities—simplicities of portrayal of the love between these two different people, the father and his new wife who could barely speak to each other. Then there was the portrayal of the grief (spoiler, sorry) of the woman for her dead husband, killed by his own son. The portrayal of grief was twofold. Again, I don’t know the cultural accuracy of the portrayal here, but I do feel the respect that was captured. The woman grieved in a song…and in a way that would not have been offered if it were not genuine. And then there was the knife and the blood—and Matt Dillon’s sleuthing of the crime scene, in part, through his explanation of the widow’s severing of two of her own fingers as an expression of grief for her loss of her husband. |
More perspective from 2021
Suzanne Lee was one of those dear friends a professor is blessed to have as a colleague. At every phase of my career at SXU, Suzanne was there—teaching, working on committees, writing articles together, collaborating on teams, and helping me and others adjust to new realities in programs and institutional politics. When she became dean, I felt the School of Education had a chance to recover from its disastrous period of rudderless drift it had endured after the long, slow, and neglected decline of the prior dean. And when Suzanne became provost, I reveled in Rick Venneri’s hallway comment to me, delivered in a nod, with a smile and that confidential gravitas of his, “She’s a straight shooter.”
After Angelo died, she and her partner, Judy, appeared on our doorstep with a pecan pie. I was not there—the family was not there—but sister-in-law Jane was, and she relayed to us later the whole episode—how concerned the visitors were about the pie getting to us, how much they had hoped to be there for us. We couldn’t be there because the whole family had flown to Thailand to recover Angelo. And it now occurs to me: have I ever conveyed to Suzanne how much her gesture of kindness meant to me then, and how much it still means to me now?
It’s hard to blame President Joyner for what happened to Suzanne Lee—i.e., her departure from the university. The two apparently were friends and respected each other. But of course, Suzanne is gone, her career truncated too early at SXU. Whether or not it was Suzanne’s choice to leave, I hold Dr. Joyner responsible, in part, for creating an environment where so many careers have ended prematurely because of, in my view, her flawed vision of who we are, what we should be doing, and how we might position ourselves for growth.
It’s appropriate that, in relaying my impressions of Suzanne’s encounter of April 7, 2016, I thought of childhood memories with George Bahumas. Suzanne’s act was so child-like. She literally ran up behind me—quietly—and put both hands over my eyes, so as to say, “Guess who,” without ever saying it. Can you imagine? How did she have both hands free—wasn’t she carrying anything? Could such a thing happen in the 21th century, with all our sacred notions of “personal space”? Could such a playful encounter occur between a dean and a faculty member ever at SXU?
Update 2021, Looking Back Again, on Angelo, through Suzanne
“Miraculous Intrusions of the Day,” Version 2, would go even deeper into the Angelo archives—before 2008, his year of graduation. Suzanne and I were having a conversation in the second-floor hallway by the stairwell, and Angelo approached to meet up with me for some reason (or maybe not? Maybe it was just one of those chance encounters, where we wound up falling into a conversation because we happened to run into each other? I’m not sure…).
As Suzanne and I conversed, in that animated way we had, I could sense Angelo looking on, maybe too intently, in my peripheral vision. When we finished and Suzanne left, Angelo looked at me, with that grin of his—I mean that really characteristic grin of his that is best described by Virginia Uphues in the documentary (at the 45:29 minute mark).
“What?” I said.
Angelo’s response was destined to become one of my favorite memories of him:
“She digs you!”
And that smile. And then, of course, my smile, because I did not expect him to say that. I didn’t feel a need to explain that I wasn’t Suzanne’s type. It was true that she dug me—and I dug her. Suzanne and I had such a friendship, one filled with sparkling eyes on both our parts and lots of inappropriate language (mostly on her part). Angelo’s observation was one of those moments where you see your kid has not only grown up, but is celebrating a kind of adult thing—here, love and friendship—in a way beyond the silliness and worry of the family drama (to get back to Lear and Gunsmoke). Angelo, in his natural hippie-speak, was being himself, capturing a truth, celebrating his dad, inhabiting the chance moment, but not letting it go till the love was communicated. I put it in the category of another comment he had made a few years earlier, where, after I had driven through the night on the last leg of a long family vacation, he commented (sensing, no doubt, my need for validation of my driving prowess), “You’re a warrior!”—a statement he made without irony, and one that caused (and still does cause) those suffusions of the heart that the recipient (till now) doesn’t talk about. Such power we have for one another as family and friends in affirmations like these. So seldom, it seems, do we (or I at least) use this super-power. It came spontaneously and naturally to Angelo in moments.
I think now of my trollish ways of interacting with loved ones, and I want to do better. And I’ll try.