Movable Feasts of Kindness
Dr. Andy remembers the kindness of a onetime professor and his family
An act of kindness sends ripples out into the universe that benefits people outside our circle, our town, and even our ever-expanding networks of friends.
Thirty-three years ago this March, my Hemingway and Fitzgerald professor Peter Hays invited our entire graduate class to his home for a dinner (what Hemingway would have called a “feast”) at our final class meeting. Living on my own in a rented room in a newly-built house on Elk Place in north Davis, this graduate student had not enjoyed many home-cooked meals. Sometimes a newcomer doesn’t realize that he belongs in his new hometown until someone invites him over for dinner.
In subsequent years, Professor Hays and I talked frequently and informally about books and about my progress as a graduate student. He also observed me giving a guest lecture on Emerson and wrote up his assessment for my teaching file. He told his wife Myrna that “this young man is going places.”
Ironically, I did not go places. The same university that trained me also hired me, so a few years after that Emerson lecture I got to call Pete a UC Davis English Department colleague. After he retired, his emeriti office was next to mine in Voorhies Hall, so he would sometimes stop by to tell me how much he enjoyed overhearing my office hour consultations on writing, poetry, and creativity.
Peter passed away unexpectedly in 2022 while vacationing with his wife at the beach. What a lovely way to go!
Fast forward to 2024, and the widow of Peter Hays, Myrna, recently introduced me to a crowd of almost 50 residents in an auditorium at the University Retirement Community. I gave a poetry reading, I talked about Gerard Manley Hopkins and other favorite poets, I mixed in funny stories about my wife Kate and our kids, and I answered some questions.
As much as I enjoyed momentously intoning my poems, my favorite part of the entire event was telling the crowd about the well-remembered hospitality of Myrna and Pete Hays from 33 years before.
Oscar Wilde said that "The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention." In the era in which we live, marked for many of us by health challenges and political division, such gestures of goodwill and hospitality strengthen the fabric of one’s community and create lasting memories that merit capturing in an essay or a poem.