Sad news today as I was informed that Trinity Professor and comrade Fred Pfeil succumbed to his battle with cancer this past weekend.  The Trinity obit and background is here.  He is the third professor and the second of the two most influential educators I had at Trinity who died suddenly and prematurely.

Metta (Loving Kindness)
May you be well and free from internal and external harm
May you be happy and peaceful
May you live with ease

To those that knew him, Fred was greater than an inspiration in the normal sense.  More than listened to, he was sensed as a quiet but unyielding force in the name of hard work and social justice.  Everybody knew of him as being “that guy” in the good way, the one who actually spoke his mind about tough issues, the one who’d been arrested 19 times and still headed a department at a little Ivy, the one who froze, starved, sang, slept, and fought with the oppressed on a daily basis.  Never claiming the limelight, his charisma reflected his solid stance and ability to delineate between right and wrong.  He was behind every left-leaning political movement on campus and in much of Connecticut and guided dozens if not hundreds of students and young people through the trials of political activism and non-violent protest.  He was there at my first big rallies in New York and Washington, at the most successful student campaign to support oppressed campus staff, at the most important referendum on the ethnic and racial status of Trinity since integration began, among many others.

Karuna (Empathy)
May you be free from pain
May you be free from suffering
May you be at peace

Oddly enough, I only had him as a professor for one semester my freshman year in Introduction to Film Studies.  The course was a perceived gut, and he made sure to quash that idea from the first day, with the announcement of 120 pages of reading, 2 movies and 3 hours of class per week, with 45 pages of writing by the end of the term.  I barely made it through, cursing the endless lectures on camera technique and direction style, even sitting through the epic back-to-back screening of The Godfather part I and II.  At the time I would say that I respected him as a person but hated all the work.  After time though his style became clear - work and live hard and without reservation, even in a film studies course, and I went out on a limb to argue in my final paper that Thelma and Louise was a male fantasy in the guise of women’s liberation.

Mudita (Sympathetic Joy)
May your happiness increase
May your good fortune continue
May you know joy

I got to know him better through V.O.I.D., a student activist organization.  Fred would attend the meetings and occasionally lead the discussions.  He also helped us organize events and trainings.  One memory I have is of Cornel West shouting him out at a talk he gave my senior year; a second is of him giving reflections to the group about a 6 week silent meditation he’d recently returned from; a third is of his stony face grimy concentrating on walking as slowly as possible in the freezing snow in front of the state house in protest.  That face was as serious as can be, yet in a second it could change and light up the darkest of rooms.  Loved by the faculty, feared by the administration, Fred taught us all that the greatest change happens closest to home.

Upekha (Equanimity)
May you accept things as they are
May you be at peace with the coming and going of things
I care for you but cannot make your choices for you
I wish you well but cannot keep you from suffering

I was lucky enough to see him by random chance at a rally for peace on September 11th of this year in Hartford.  The event was pathetically attended but sure enough, he was there.  Having not seen him for months, I was saddened to hear his grim talk of his chances of surviving the treatments for his condition.  In much the same way as I could sense my grandmother’s impending passing, I felt this would be the last time I saw him.  His death was early and untimely - I would have liked him to see the fruits of his labor and someday bask in the light of the justice he pursued with all his heart.  May he rest in peace.

It’s snowing, it’s snowing, I’m so thankful!  Oh, it stopped.

The past three weeks have been a bit of a blur of busy-ness:  tossing little Japanese kids around a park, getting on my monkey suit to go shoot AmCham bore-a-thons (i.e. “Tax Changes for Fiscal 2006″ to which the opening line was: “There’s bad news, and no news.”), kanji practice, water (with gas or not?), subways, photographs, airplanes and e-mails from far-off friends.  Somewhere in there I had a birthday, which was celebrated with a delicious beer, a slice of delicious cake, and a deliciously grim realization that in combination with the 1/4 to 1/3 of my life I have and will spend sleeping, I am already middle aged.  All the warning signs are there: sore joints after exercise, crankiness when hungry, obsessed reading of the New York Times, repeating the same stories about my crazy youth over and over, etc.  I also find it frustrating that as my body gets older, my mind stays the same age, around 4, with the added abilities of being able to wipe my own nose and read my own watch.  I am happy to have been going to the climbing gym near “the office” lately, which has quite a good bouldering area but very few marked routes, meaning I just free climb and amaze the regulars with how weak I am.  Mom, for Christmas I want iron supplements.

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