Over the past couple of weeks, I've received a few emails and notes from people who knew my friend John Dauns who died June 4. They all had their own memories of John, and their stories triggered a few more memories of mine.
John was the single most law-abiding person I ever met. I suppose it comes from his having been a refugee with that implicit fear that all safety could be lost in the blink of an eye for not obeying the proper authorities.
Meanwhile, I'd been schooled by the Jesuits, particularly a salty British Jesuit named Gerard Bussy S.J., a British army veteran who'd fought with Montgomery in North Africa and picked up the vocabulary to go with his military service. Father Bussy, who was my major professor at my university's philosophy department and who taught my ethics course, was quick to scoff at things like no-parking signs and speed limits, and dismiss them as ``purely penal law'' that could be broken as long as one accepted the accompanying sanctions. This made perfect sense to me but can you see the potential for conflict with John?
We went to the Yucatan one Easter week back in the early 1980s. As usual, I found many Mexican crafts to my liking, and came home with my suitcase loaded with embroidery, woven items, folk jewelry and even a few small pottery pieces. We flew home from Merida to New Orleans by way of Houston, which is where we cleared customs and immigration.
We had very little time between flights, so when we got to customs, I simply gave a verbal declaration, telling the agent I'd spent about $200 on various Mexican craft items. But John stopped to fill out a customs form and go over it with the agent, who simply stood there incredulous. That's because all John had to declare was one picture postcard he'd bought. But there was no way he'd dare risk going through customs without making the proper declaration. We almost missed our connecting flight, and I still remember the look on the custom agent's face when he had to process John's declaration.
John went on sabbatical from Tulane University when I lived in New Orleans. He spent his sabbatical teaching at the University of Natal (now the University of Kwazulu-Natal) and the University of Stellenbosch, both in South Africa. When he left for Africa, I offered to take him to the airport, even though I knew he had this powerful need to be there at least five hours before a flight, just in case. In those days, it was possible to accompany a departing passenger all the way to the gate, but once we got onto the concourse, they wouldn't let us back into the main part of the airport where the restaurants and shops were located.
So there we sat for five hours. No food. No magazines or newspapers to distract us. At one point in the long wait, it occurred to me that I'd never seen John's passport. So I asked him to show it to me. I was unprepared for what happened next.
He unzipped his fly, reached into his trousers, and unpinned the safety pin he'd fastened to the inside of his pants to keep his pocket safely shut. Then he pulled out his passport. I suggested that perhaps he ought to modify that maneuver to go through international passport control, as officials would be likely to misinterpret the fly-unzipping gesture.
One of my treasures is an ebony bowl he brought me back from Africa. I keep my extra thread in it, so it's always close at hand when I'm sewing. The carvings on its outside depict South African gold miners at work.
John lived totally inside his head. I suppose this may be true of many mathematicians, but he may have been an extreme case. The welfare of his brain was very important to him, and he was fearful of anything that could potentially cut off the flow of blood and oxygen to his brain.
He was always very slender, but he wore shirts with the biggest possible neck size, so as not to constrict his carotid artery. I used to think his skinny neck was like the clapper in a very large bell.
At the time I first met him, I was living in a very tiny two-room former slave quarters behind one of the big houses on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue. John was very nervous that the house might be airtight, and deprive his brain of oxygen, so he was continually opening the door. Whenever he'd spend the night, he'd get up half a dozen times to make sure the door was, at the very least, halfway open. One morning I had company arrive and walk right in through the open door. I saw a flash of skin with my peripheral vision and realized that suddenly a tall and naked mathematician had leaped from the bed and dived into the closet.
One year a friend invited us over for brunch on my birthday, which is in January, a generally chilly month in New Orleans. The friend lived in one of the old New Orleans houses with a gas wall heater in the living room. The minute John saw it, he backed out the door and wouldn't stick more than his nose into the room. He was just sure that we'd all die of carbon monoxide poisoning from being in that room, and his brain cells would all be damaged.
So we left, and instead he said he'd take me to brunch at the Gumbo Shop down in the French Quarter. (The Gumbo Shop was one of the few places in New Orleans at that time that made calas, which is a kind of rice fritter eaten with Steen's sugar syrup, and I was a great calas fan).
We were seated outside, on the patio and had just ordered when John noticed the gas-powered portable heaters. He stood up and announced to everyone, ``this is not good. This is not safe. You could get carbon monoxide poisoning here. It's not good to eat here.''
That was probably the only time I really got angry at him. And the only time John ever got really angry at me was when we were in Hawaii and he was giving a paper at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society. We were walking down the street in Honolulu and he was really frustrated and annoyed that I was able to identify accurately who, among the crowds of tourists, the mathematicians were. Trust me, it wasn't hard . . . .
John saw the world through the filter of his particular area of mathematics, ring-theory algebra. The first time he came to visit me in Northern California, I drove down the peninsula, ultimately taking him to Big Sur and Carmel. On the way home, I drove up El Camino Real and stopped at Stanford University. I asked him if he would like to take a look at the campus.
Oh no, was his response. This university was not intellectually respectable as they didn't teach ring-theory algebra. He wouldn't and didn't set foot outside the car. So much for Stanford.
I always was the one to drive after our first date. On that day John picked me up in his Dodge Dart of ancient vintage and took me to a movie in Metairie, a suburb up the river from New Orleans. After the movie, we were tightly hemmed in by other cars in the parking lot. This didn't seem to bother John, who did a kind of bumper pool, nudging all the cars with his.
When we finally got out of the parking lot, we got on the I-10 freeway, on which John drove at a consistent 27 miles per hour. People honked and displayed their middle fingers at him, but he was nonplussed. ``They can go over me or around me,'' he said. He told me he insisted on double the liability coverage his car insurance company recommended, probably a good idea, all things considered. I think he lived so much in his head that he wasn't aware of where he was in time and space, and that's a dangerous preoccupation for a driver. So it's a good thing that he depended mainly on his bicycle.
John was very very very careful with his money--he hated it when Woolworth's closed in New Orleans as he considered it a great place to buy clothes--but he was also the soul of generosity with me and really liked taking care of me in ways he considered appropriate. When we went to Oaxaca together, I ate something on the street I shouldn't have, and got a case of tourista from hell. It didn't hit until we were on a DC-3 flight to Puerto Escondido from Oaxaca. I was sicker than the proverbial dog, with a high temperature, vomiting and the usual GI disturbances.
By the time we got to the hotel, I could barely walk. John was scared so he had the hotel call a doctor, who came, gave me an injection of something and told John I had to drink lots of liquid lest I get dehydrated. This was a problem John was ready to solve. In 10 minutes he was back in our room with two cases of bottled mineral water. Unlike mineral water from other parts of Mexico, this was grayish and tasted like soap suds. But John stood over me until I drank bottle after bottle.
I think John believed I was an artist long before I was ready to claim the title. One year for my birthday, a heavy package came in the mail. I opened it and found ``Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition,'' which is the canonical art-history textbook. John said simply ``I knew you'd need it some day.'' The following year brought an equally weighty text on modern art. He took seriously the work I did, and told someone at Tulane that the quilt I made him was his most valuable possession.
Another year my then 12-year-old daughter Martha came from Seattle to spend Christmas with me. It was a year of extreme cold in New Orleans, with pipes freezing, and tropical plants dying all over the city. John and I took Martha to Pensacola for the day. It was very very cold, and, by the time we got there, the sun was already low and everything had long blue shadows. We stepped on the beach's famous white sands, and it was so cold that it felt like snow. So there the three of us spent a good hour, ``skiing'' on the sand. Ice crystals were beginning to form along the water's edge, which only added to the illusion of a snowy adventure.
I didn't see John every day, although we were in daily contact by email. So I can't miss him the way I would if he had lived here and suddenly were no longer in the house. But he was a powerful and long-standing connection, and every day I find myself thinking of things I want to tell him, or news stories I want to forward to him. There's a book written by a bereaved parent about her dead child titled ``The Absence of the Dead is How We Remember Them,'' and I guess, for me, that's true about John.
Here's a photo I shot of John several years ago with as much of a smile as I ever was able to tease out of him for a photo. He did liked to be serious in photos. Photos were important to him, and film was not to be wasted. I'm sure that whoever is going through his effects will find his camera with an as yet uncompleted roll of film that has photos from when he got his undergraduate degree from MIT in the 1950s. When I shot this particular photo, we were at a sushi bar on the Island of Alameda where we had Christmas dinner. He wouldn't let me cook Christmas dinner, so we had to go looking for whatever we could find that was open.
John had terrible teeth, worn down nearly to the gum line in the front I think this was the result of his inadequate nutrition when he was a refugee during World War II, after his family fled Latvia. There were many things he just couldn't enjoy eating, because they were too difficult for him to eat. But the teriyaki salmon he had that night was perfectly to his liking. When I look at this photo, I can see the kind and intelligent man he was and I'm so sorry his life had to end when, and in the fashion it did.
I so enjoy your posts, even these posts that bring you sadness. What is remembered lives.
Posted by: Hollyheartfree | July 08, 2009 at 11:42 AM