Cosmos Mariner

Sam Scoville has died. Chances are excellent that you have no idea who that is. But Sam having been on this earth and having lived his vocation is fundamental to me and the living of my vocation.

In 1985, as a first-year student at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, I elected a freshman course that assigned me Sam as my adviser. In the 1980s, at Warren Wilson, 95 percent of the students and 90 percent of the faculty lived on the campus, most of the latter in homes along the rolling green hills of the many-acre property. It was a community as well as an accredited four-year school with an excellent reputation and impressive faculty and staff. (No football team, however.)

All of which is to say, I never called him Dr. Scoville in my life. Still don't. The point, though, is Sam. Sam was very ... zen-ish as an adviser. I'd be sitting in that plastic-scoop chair, and he'd have his long lean New England frame folded, sort of, into his swivel-reclining chair, or gazing out his office window while we talked. Should I take this course or that one, Sam? Sam would unleash his slow Atticus Finch grin. What do you think you should do? Sam kept me mostly on track during the four years of which my know-it-all smarty-pants self had an ongoing prickly relationship with another English-department major. It was some years before I was able to acknowledge that the prickles were mostly on my side and the unhappy episode in my final semester was also my responsibility. 

Of course, Sam was the good-natured, economical of speech, unconcerned of future adviser. He was also a direct descendant of Lyman Beecher, thus Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was a graduate of Yale; his doctoral dissertation from Duke was on an aspect of Nathaniel Hawthorne (to whom, who knows, he might also have been related). He had served for a time as the dean at Warren Wilson. 

During his office hours, our conversation would often veer into matters of religion, as I explored the paths of belief. He respected the explorations I was making, showed interest, and kept his own Presbyterian counsel. After I graduated, we kept in touch, mostly on Facebook. A couple of times, when I was in the area, we visited. 

The last occasion was two years ago. As a gift for my 50th birthday, my husband and I had booked a weekend at an Airbnb - we were looking for the Asheville area, and one we liked turned out to be in Swannanoa. Ooh! Ooh! Yes, we booked it and it was lovely. It was really the first occasion in then-24 years of marriage for us to be on indisputably my turf. 

Having got in touch with Sam, I arranged that we would see him on a mid-morning in his office. He was then Sam-zenning his way into retirement at the end of that term, being increasingly crippled by arthritis. He was, however, his usual self, slow of speech, gently pleased by our marital happiness and impressed that I was now a Lutheran pastor. Before we left, he looked to his bookshelves and gave me a large book bound in soft leather, a daily-prayer book with ribbon markers for a season of the year. (Presbyterian, of course.) He inscribed it to me. 

He had "watched my career with great interest."* As in, "I know my own, and my own know me" (John 10:14b, NRSV). As do all good teachers, those for whom teaching is a vocation. 

My dad, now retired, was one such college professor, of the craft and art of journalism. Now in his eighties, if you say the name of a former student, his face lights up. He has watched their careers with great interest. He knows his own, and his own know him. 

How did I come to know Warren Wilson College? At the time, our family were members of a Presbyterian church in our town. Another member was then the dean of the school of journalism at a time when my dad, unhappy in a job he held for a year or so, was looking for a change. This church member had a son who had graduated from Warren Wilson before going on to what would become an impressive vocation in, I think, marine biology. He mentioned the place to my dad, who mentioned it to me.

My baptism at age four months was into the Presbyterian church. We mostly attended United Methodist congregations until, while I was in college, my parents returned to the United Church of Christ (my mother had been brought up a Congregationalist in New England).

Do you see how relational this all is? Do you see how each of us is bound to the other? Go and see, go and tell, go and invite. Maybe the good Presbyterians in the house would say that it all was foreordained. (Shout-out to John Calvin!)

Conrad Aiken, poet, lived from 1889 to 1973. Born and brought up in Savannah, Ga., he also has a bench in the cemetery there that serves as his grave marker. It reads, "Conrad Aiken/Cosmos Mariner."

As a coastal Georgian, he enjoyed reading the shipping news in the newspaper. It nursed his wanderlust. He is said to have seen in the list one day, either of ships going out from the port or ships coming into port, a ship with that name. Locals say that that is when he decided to have such an identity as his marker.**

Godspeed to you, Sam, cosmos mariner.

*A line from Palpatine to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
**Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Random House, 1994. By John Berendt.