Andy
Andrew W. Preston, Jr.
1935 – 1999
1935 – 1999
"Art and eloquence,
And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquility, Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were."1 |
For a quarter-century and more, Andy Preston was my friend and when I recollect his features, I am reminded of the ponderous head of that stubborn root, Dr. Samuel Johnson. No unkindness is intended in comparing a humble citizen with one of the great personalities our kind has produced. Each strove to follow the example set by Christ, without ever supposing comparison would be unfair. I would not call down ridicule upon a friend by invidious comparison nor on myself for making it. Both men seem to this observer of their lives to have felt morally compelled to force themselves by strength of will to be better than they supposed they really were. They both seem to have done this out of an irritable commitment to principle in a sensual, passionate personality directed against its own first impulse. In Johnson, critics2 have attributed this impulse to "the will to immortality," or the awareness of death’s imminence.
Andy, not unlike Johnson, deplored the trivialities his emotional intensity constantly reached for--potato salad and pinochle and other creature comforts, his moral introspection condemned as trivial. Both men directed this primally passionate nature into orthodox religious channels.
An interesting comment on the poet, Shelley, from whose work the quotation above is taken, is made by the editors of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature. "Rather, he was a visionary skeptic, who found he could not reconcile heart and head, and could not bear to deceive either."3 It was a trick of Johnson’s to take the trite at its word, to refurbish the outworn in such fashion that it seemed so fresh again that the reader must wear it. He may be found working this Oriental art of jiu-jitsu in his verse:
"The cranes looked down upon the eagles..." (The War of Cranes and Eagles)
and in his religious practice, where he refused to participate with the herd in the somewhat ostentatious practice of an un-announced communion, not having prepared his spirit adequately in advance.
Andy followed much the same course, omitting the verse, demanding of one Protestant congregation after another a more impassioned and sincere dedication to the forms and formularies which were their open statements of faith, somewhat staled with long exposure to the air. We were of the same generation, a decade separated, and may have followed, in our idiosyncratic ways, the same impulse to seek out some hold closer to the root, which produced the folk-movement of the sixties. In fact, this penchant for sincere idiosyncracy, for making the general trends of society personally our own is something we honored in each other and may have been, aside from our wives’ friendship, an important part of what kept our acquaintance alive. For Andy it led to non-anthropological interest in the un-air-conditioned Mennonite church, where I sat through his funeral and eulogies in early summer’s heat.
The dominant mood of the informal eulogists was best expressed in Mont Blanc by Shelley.
"Some say...
--that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live."4
Which may be placed against his other lines,
"So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled..."
...of which the editors note that, Wordsworthian "faith so mild" is an idealism which prevents us from being reconciled with nature’s indifference, unlike the Shelleyan "awful doubt."5
Neither mild nor Wordsworthian in his faith, nor an "awful doubter," like Shelley, Andy resembled the Samuel Johnson who commented to Boswell, when the biographer had ventured to hope that one might fortify the mind for the approach of death.
‘"No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time." He added, with an earnest look, "a man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine."’6 The editors go on to say, ‘A passionately religious temperament, Shelley evolved what might be termed a Protestant Orphism as his personal faith, a strenuous prophecy of human renovation in which fallen men would rise to
"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea...."’7
His confidence in the renovating effect of sincere, even enthusiastic religion is only problematically Protestant Orphism, but certainly Andy took the church at its word that all members of the congregation might freely sing. One is made to recollect the Roman orator of antiquity, Stentor, but not for anything particular he said. Practice makes perfect...eventually, they say. Too much of a good thing or just too much? The wicked angel of Blake’s Songs of Experience is brought to mind: "Even a fool may succeed if he perseveres in his folly." Andy’s singing was rendered an endearing foible in a worthy brother by one after another of the mourners at his funeral, who contributed informally from their pews.
I was introduced to Andy and his wife, Claudia, by my own new wife shortly after our marriage. At that time he was teaching new math to old-fashioned junior high school students and as he put it, he had enough post-graduate credits for two master’s degrees and still his income had never exceeded four figures. Andy felt the need of money about this time for his growing family, for whom he felt the compulsion to provide. I had never thought of the number of digits required to denote my own income, but I wrongly attributed this to-me-novel usage to his background as a math teacher. In fact, Andy was an aggressive man, who believed that giving credit where due was a moral act which might just as well begin at home. He was out of patience with teaching and about to enter the world of business as an insurance rep. To make a successful living in that field it takes a pinochle player’s facility of knowing where the cards are hidden and evangelical sincerity.
He managed both, despite his frank admission over cards one evening, "I don’t have any life insurance for myself. I don’t believe in it." His insurance was Above and the adventures in faith of Corrie tenBoom, which he loaned me in that period, were the success stories he strove to emulate in the beginning of his career. It was never clear to me whether time, which wears even stones, eroded his confidence in the sufficiency of a mansion in heaven to meet the needs of a wife and four children, or whether his decision to join the wine-sellers and taste of his own wares, arose from the natural human tendency to create one piece of the parts from which we cobble a life. Both influences were probably at work.
In addition to the fascinating tales of living on the edge recounted by Corrie tenBoom from her life as Christian guerilla, beginning in war-time Holland, Andy exhibited his didactic tendency in advice on the subject of family planning to those whom he felt would live better, happier lives for it. Not for naught was he a teacher. Gathering the facts, he marshaled them for review until the birth of his third child in a twenty-seven month span. "He was born wearing the IUD on his wrist for a bracelet," Andy explained. He knew when to give up.
Ten years his junior, I have followed in Andy’s foot-steps quite a while and I will be marking the days until I reach the age at which he died. It was Andy who looked into the new phenomena of condominiums and convinced us to purchase one in the complex where he and his wife had settled with their family. He taught me that one may look up the value of a used car or of a household appliance before buying it. As Johnson said of Shakespeare in his Preface, that greater one for whom he was serving as mirror-with-a-voice, that he had great practical prudence. We are pleased to agree with those (Harold Bloom), who would have it that this is wisdom.8
Andy brought all his instructional skills to the task of teaching my wife and I to play pinochle. This is an area which escaped the Mennonite eulogists. My wife, who is as sharp and sweet as a key-lime pie needed only to be told once and shown a few times to be triumphantly catching Claudi and I at our reneges. Unfortunately, after a year of regular, weekly sessions, still, when I would abruptly ask, "What’s trump?" what I really meant was, What is trump, anyway? I would look at Claudia, who would shrug, as one does to a young child asking a question too profound for it possibly to understand the answer. And it used to cause Andy to fold his cards, place his palm on the table and look at me over his spectacles.
At first we played at cards as in life, with our wives as our partners. My wife made a reasonable match for Andy on the opposing side. His wife, Claudia, is silken-surfaced and undisturbed as a Nestlrode pudding. When delved into, she proves equally smooth in her depths, very rich and slightly nutty. She and I weighed in at the same level, more or less, as far as pinochle was concerned, but Claudi had an advantage of which I was envious: she freely and un-resentfully acknowledge her status as card-carrying incompetent. We played that way for several months, with the balance tolerably equal between our sets of partners and then, for novelty’s sake, we traded and played guys against gals. But still, the balance was maintained, though three quarters of the games always went to whichever side Andy sat on.
Only in heaven will tedium not be a problem. And so, in the spirit of devilish whimsicality, we agreed one evening to partner Claudia and myself, the two millstones, just for my wife to see what it must be like to play with a partner who understood the dynamics of the game and who did not gather wool or rosebuds between taking his turns.
But we trounced them. Andy couldn’t believe it. None of us could, really, but Claudia and I were willing to try and my wife is a sport. The phenomenon graveled Andy because he knew we didn’t know what we were about. He had to tell Claudia and I when it was our turn, what was trump and that we had taken the trick. And still, he could not take a point with an ace. No matter how the cards were shuffled or by whom, no matter what cards he was dealt, regardless of the phases of the moon, he couldn’t win a single game. If he had a king, Claudia or I had an ace. If he had an ace, we had the trump. If he had trump, we out-trumped it inadvertently, trying to snatch back the winning card in our folly. It finally put an end to our pinochle sessions, which had survived an entire winter of Claudia surreptitiously turning down the thermostat an hour after we had arrived. There could be no mortal explanation for the run of luck Claudia and I were given. I am sure it somehow confirmed Andy’s faith; Claudia’s was never in question.
1.Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1816, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, eds., Oxford University Press, New York 1973 , page 408.
2.Bloom, op cit, pg. 187.
3. op cit, page 400.
4. Mont Blanc, Shelley, op cit, page 412.
5. Mont Blanc, Shelley, op cit, page 412.
6. Bloom, op cit, pg. 185.
7. op cit, page 400.
8. op cit, pg. 190.
Andy, not unlike Johnson, deplored the trivialities his emotional intensity constantly reached for--potato salad and pinochle and other creature comforts, his moral introspection condemned as trivial. Both men directed this primally passionate nature into orthodox religious channels.
An interesting comment on the poet, Shelley, from whose work the quotation above is taken, is made by the editors of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature. "Rather, he was a visionary skeptic, who found he could not reconcile heart and head, and could not bear to deceive either."3 It was a trick of Johnson’s to take the trite at its word, to refurbish the outworn in such fashion that it seemed so fresh again that the reader must wear it. He may be found working this Oriental art of jiu-jitsu in his verse:
"The cranes looked down upon the eagles..." (The War of Cranes and Eagles)
and in his religious practice, where he refused to participate with the herd in the somewhat ostentatious practice of an un-announced communion, not having prepared his spirit adequately in advance.
Andy followed much the same course, omitting the verse, demanding of one Protestant congregation after another a more impassioned and sincere dedication to the forms and formularies which were their open statements of faith, somewhat staled with long exposure to the air. We were of the same generation, a decade separated, and may have followed, in our idiosyncratic ways, the same impulse to seek out some hold closer to the root, which produced the folk-movement of the sixties. In fact, this penchant for sincere idiosyncracy, for making the general trends of society personally our own is something we honored in each other and may have been, aside from our wives’ friendship, an important part of what kept our acquaintance alive. For Andy it led to non-anthropological interest in the un-air-conditioned Mennonite church, where I sat through his funeral and eulogies in early summer’s heat.
The dominant mood of the informal eulogists was best expressed in Mont Blanc by Shelley.
"Some say...
--that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live."4
Which may be placed against his other lines,
"So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled..."
...of which the editors note that, Wordsworthian "faith so mild" is an idealism which prevents us from being reconciled with nature’s indifference, unlike the Shelleyan "awful doubt."5
Neither mild nor Wordsworthian in his faith, nor an "awful doubter," like Shelley, Andy resembled the Samuel Johnson who commented to Boswell, when the biographer had ventured to hope that one might fortify the mind for the approach of death.
‘"No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time." He added, with an earnest look, "a man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine."’6 The editors go on to say, ‘A passionately religious temperament, Shelley evolved what might be termed a Protestant Orphism as his personal faith, a strenuous prophecy of human renovation in which fallen men would rise to
"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea...."’7
His confidence in the renovating effect of sincere, even enthusiastic religion is only problematically Protestant Orphism, but certainly Andy took the church at its word that all members of the congregation might freely sing. One is made to recollect the Roman orator of antiquity, Stentor, but not for anything particular he said. Practice makes perfect...eventually, they say. Too much of a good thing or just too much? The wicked angel of Blake’s Songs of Experience is brought to mind: "Even a fool may succeed if he perseveres in his folly." Andy’s singing was rendered an endearing foible in a worthy brother by one after another of the mourners at his funeral, who contributed informally from their pews.
I was introduced to Andy and his wife, Claudia, by my own new wife shortly after our marriage. At that time he was teaching new math to old-fashioned junior high school students and as he put it, he had enough post-graduate credits for two master’s degrees and still his income had never exceeded four figures. Andy felt the need of money about this time for his growing family, for whom he felt the compulsion to provide. I had never thought of the number of digits required to denote my own income, but I wrongly attributed this to-me-novel usage to his background as a math teacher. In fact, Andy was an aggressive man, who believed that giving credit where due was a moral act which might just as well begin at home. He was out of patience with teaching and about to enter the world of business as an insurance rep. To make a successful living in that field it takes a pinochle player’s facility of knowing where the cards are hidden and evangelical sincerity.
He managed both, despite his frank admission over cards one evening, "I don’t have any life insurance for myself. I don’t believe in it." His insurance was Above and the adventures in faith of Corrie tenBoom, which he loaned me in that period, were the success stories he strove to emulate in the beginning of his career. It was never clear to me whether time, which wears even stones, eroded his confidence in the sufficiency of a mansion in heaven to meet the needs of a wife and four children, or whether his decision to join the wine-sellers and taste of his own wares, arose from the natural human tendency to create one piece of the parts from which we cobble a life. Both influences were probably at work.
In addition to the fascinating tales of living on the edge recounted by Corrie tenBoom from her life as Christian guerilla, beginning in war-time Holland, Andy exhibited his didactic tendency in advice on the subject of family planning to those whom he felt would live better, happier lives for it. Not for naught was he a teacher. Gathering the facts, he marshaled them for review until the birth of his third child in a twenty-seven month span. "He was born wearing the IUD on his wrist for a bracelet," Andy explained. He knew when to give up.
Ten years his junior, I have followed in Andy’s foot-steps quite a while and I will be marking the days until I reach the age at which he died. It was Andy who looked into the new phenomena of condominiums and convinced us to purchase one in the complex where he and his wife had settled with their family. He taught me that one may look up the value of a used car or of a household appliance before buying it. As Johnson said of Shakespeare in his Preface, that greater one for whom he was serving as mirror-with-a-voice, that he had great practical prudence. We are pleased to agree with those (Harold Bloom), who would have it that this is wisdom.8
Andy brought all his instructional skills to the task of teaching my wife and I to play pinochle. This is an area which escaped the Mennonite eulogists. My wife, who is as sharp and sweet as a key-lime pie needed only to be told once and shown a few times to be triumphantly catching Claudi and I at our reneges. Unfortunately, after a year of regular, weekly sessions, still, when I would abruptly ask, "What’s trump?" what I really meant was, What is trump, anyway? I would look at Claudia, who would shrug, as one does to a young child asking a question too profound for it possibly to understand the answer. And it used to cause Andy to fold his cards, place his palm on the table and look at me over his spectacles.
At first we played at cards as in life, with our wives as our partners. My wife made a reasonable match for Andy on the opposing side. His wife, Claudia, is silken-surfaced and undisturbed as a Nestlrode pudding. When delved into, she proves equally smooth in her depths, very rich and slightly nutty. She and I weighed in at the same level, more or less, as far as pinochle was concerned, but Claudi had an advantage of which I was envious: she freely and un-resentfully acknowledge her status as card-carrying incompetent. We played that way for several months, with the balance tolerably equal between our sets of partners and then, for novelty’s sake, we traded and played guys against gals. But still, the balance was maintained, though three quarters of the games always went to whichever side Andy sat on.
Only in heaven will tedium not be a problem. And so, in the spirit of devilish whimsicality, we agreed one evening to partner Claudia and myself, the two millstones, just for my wife to see what it must be like to play with a partner who understood the dynamics of the game and who did not gather wool or rosebuds between taking his turns.
But we trounced them. Andy couldn’t believe it. None of us could, really, but Claudia and I were willing to try and my wife is a sport. The phenomenon graveled Andy because he knew we didn’t know what we were about. He had to tell Claudia and I when it was our turn, what was trump and that we had taken the trick. And still, he could not take a point with an ace. No matter how the cards were shuffled or by whom, no matter what cards he was dealt, regardless of the phases of the moon, he couldn’t win a single game. If he had a king, Claudia or I had an ace. If he had an ace, we had the trump. If he had trump, we out-trumped it inadvertently, trying to snatch back the winning card in our folly. It finally put an end to our pinochle sessions, which had survived an entire winter of Claudia surreptitiously turning down the thermostat an hour after we had arrived. There could be no mortal explanation for the run of luck Claudia and I were given. I am sure it somehow confirmed Andy’s faith; Claudia’s was never in question.
1.Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1816, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, eds., Oxford University Press, New York 1973 , page 408.
2.Bloom, op cit, pg. 187.
3. op cit, page 400.
4. Mont Blanc, Shelley, op cit, page 412.
5. Mont Blanc, Shelley, op cit, page 412.
6. Bloom, op cit, pg. 185.
7. op cit, page 400.
8. op cit, pg. 190.