Stephanie Hunt

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“I walk into a large white room,” begins Twyla Tharp in her book, The Creative Habit. In this large white room there are wall-to-wall mirrors, a boom box, skid marks on an otherwise clean white floor, and that’s it. Tharp describes how this vacuous whiteness ignites her imaginative muscle, and despite its daunting void, how she slowly moves into it and deliberately begins to fill it with movement and music, with playful openness and intention, and through some alchemy of mystery and madness, creativity emerges into form, shape and energy—a dance.

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The L.L.Bean catalogs faithfully arrive, one or two a week, it seems. A yellow Lab on each cover—there’s the “aw, so cute!” puppy all tuckered out on a tartan-plaid doggie bed; a handsome older dog on another cover, wagging its tail faithfully beside a handsome, wholesome-looking model sporting a classic field coat and leaning on a split-rail fence frosted in snow. It’s December alright; some things never change.

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“Yes Ma’am” was the rule when I was growing up. “Yes Ma’am”—the unequivocal, ever-ready reply when answering my mother or grandmother, teacher or aunt—a swift, usually chipper, verbal nod. Talking back was not an option, at least not audibly. When I was really pissed off, the “Ma’am” became sassy punctuation, a spoken right hook, my tongue a balled fist pushing against my bottom teeth. “Yes. MA’AM!” I’d huff, then stomp off or slam the door. My combustible temper and polished manners all rolled up in one not-so-polite mouthful.

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I imagine Duke Chapel’s bells sent beautiful, somber octaves over the campus, tolling, with deep melodious echoes, the news of his death. I can sense the hush that must have fallen over the Quad, students a little worse for the wear on a Friday morning, either hungover or bug-eyed tired from all-night studying, shuffling reverently to class. I imagine that colleagues in the English Department left an empty chair at the front of their classrooms, the academic version of a riderless horse in a funeral caisson. It was that kind of loss.