Missing Ed Devlin

Moth goes into a podiatrist's office. Doctor asks what the matter is. Moth says, "Doc, my life sucks. I'm having trouble at home, my kids don't even recognize me, my job is crap and I'm getting old." Podiatrist asks, "Can you trace this difficulty to anything in your past?" Moth says, "Yeah. I was abandoned as an egg, I had a very difficult larval stage, and now that I'm an adult, I can't seem to sort anything out." Podiatrist says, "Well, it seems to me that you need to see a psychiatrist, not a podiatrist. Why in the world did you come in here?" Moth replies, "The light was on."

My friend Ed Devlin died this week and I’m looking for ways to channel my memories as I try to get used to the idea that he’s gone. He was a great friend, one of the big five or six irreplaceable soulmates I have been blessed with on my trips around the sun.

Jehovah's Witness
training facility

The moth joke is not a non sequitur. I remember Ed first and foremost as a jokester, and it seemed like a good place to begin would be to share a sample of his wit, selected at random from among the many hundreds of illustrations of his sense of humor sent my way over the years.

I first met Ed at San Francisco State in the late 60s, when we were both in the M.A. TESL program (Teaching English as a Second Language). He also headed up the Liberian Language Project and I worked under him with a team of linguists and with two native speakers of Kru to analyze the grammar and set up an introductory course in the language for Peace Corps Volunteers. My first impression of him was of a sharp wit and a keen intelligence. What otherwise could well have turned into a heavy slog of pulling out syntax and vocabulary in a messy trial-and-error fashion became an exciting adventure, thanks in no small part to his affability. I felt cheated when the project came to an end.

With my M.A. in hand, I went off to Japan in March of 1970, to start my career as an ESL teacher. To my absolute delight, when I returned to the U.S. from Japan in the summer of 1974 and started teaching in the summer orientation program for foreign students at Stanford, I discovered Ed was working there as well. This time, we quickly became close friends.  

Because by this time I had built up a strong sense of connection with Japan, I was having trouble letting go and was trying to carve out a way to spend half my time in Tokyo and the other half in San Francisco. The great majority of Japanese students getting advanced degrees at Stanford were employed by either a government ministry or a large corporation like Toyota or Canon and Ed and I came up with the idea of getting their company sponsors to underwrite a three-month prep program in Tokyo before they left for the U.S., which the two of us would run. The naivety of the whole thing makes me blush today, but at the time it seemed like an idea worth trying.

Ed ran the ESL program at Monterey Peninsula College year round. I had not been able to find anything other than part-time jobs in the Bay Area since my return, so Ed suggested I come to Monterey. We’d get an apartment, I’d play housewife and he’d pay the rent, and we’d work up a proposal to take to the corporate sponsors in Tokyo. I jumped at the idea.

We made our way together to Tokyo and got an apartment in Nakano, near Shinjuku. With some introductions by former students I managed to set up appointments with the personnel directors of several of the companies who had sent students to Stanford as part of their career enhancement programs. Japanese salary men tended to stay with their companies for life in those days, so such investments in employees were routine. We were warmly received and hopeful we might get the project off the ground initially, but it wasn’t long before it became evident that no one would take the first step. The personnel managers all said they would go along if somebody else would sign on first. We came home empty-handed.

We managed nonetheless to have a great time in Tokyo, and Ed and I got to know each other much better with each passing day. “All this time,” he said to me once, “I always thought you had a superb sense of direction. But I'm on to you. You just move around so fast, and in all directions, and eventually it's inevitable that you hit upon your destination.” I loved the fact that somebody knew me well enough to be able to make that observation.

When we returned to California, Ed got me a job teaching part time at Monterey Peninsula College and I patched together a living with a couple of other bits and pieces, and we settled in for the duration while I tried to figure out where to go and what to do next, a story complicated by the fact that I had left behind in Japan a relationship that should have concluded, but didn’t. I had established a can’t live with him/ can’t live without him affair with Yochan, and with Ed’s connections at MPC, we were able to bring him over, as well. Yochan had virtually no English, but he was a superb communicator nonetheless, and Ed and Yochan hit it off beautifully. Yochan referred to me as “Mr. Hysteria” on occasion and asked Ed how it was that he could remain so calm when I would get so visibly hot under the collar. Ed picked up his shirt, showed Yochan a scar on his belly from a gall bladder operation. “Don’t blame Alan,” he said. “By getting things out, he will never have to worry about ulcers or stomach problems. Yochan took a minute to grasp Ed’s meaning, but soon joined me in understanding a side of Ed I hadn’t seen before, and perhaps a reason for his ability - or need - to keep the jokes coming.

By the third or fourth year of working part-time ESL jobs, with no job security, and very little income, my job at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies led to a job offer with the United Nations in Saudi Arabia at four times my annual income. I left Ed and Yochan behind, choosing adventure over their company - and drawn by the thought of quadrupling my annual salary. Ed and I kept up an active correspondence while I was gone. I supplied him with stories of goats eating my carburetor cables and he kept me supplied with jokes and cartoons. An endless supply of puns, images of cake disasters, word play, limericks and other ways of playing with the English language. My only wish is that I had kept them all.

one of the simpler cake wrecks
Ed took delight in sending
my way

When the UN job in Saudi Arabia came to a close after a year (it was now 1977),  I returned to the house in Carmel I had shared with Ed, planning to take up the life I had left behind. But Yochan had gone back to Japan and a job opened up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that meant my second Monterey Peninsula sojourn (my first was my year at the Army Language School in 1962-3) came to a close. But not my working connection with Ed, it turned out. They were looking for a new director. I put Ed’s name in and he got the job and we were off and running as colleagues once more.

Life in Santa Cruz was a step up for me. I had wonderful colleagues and there was a large community of LGBT folks and my social life improved notably. Among those colleagues was a woman named Debbie Wright. I introduced her to Ed, they hit it off, and the next thing we were holding a wedding on the campus.

It was too good to last. Ed returned to Monterey, UC hired a total disaster of a replacement who ran the program into the ground, and the four of us senior teachers all scattered, Debbie to get a PhD at Santa Cruz, and me to a PhD program at Stanford.

Ed and I had a friendship that would endure, even when he and Debbie called their marriage off after something like sixteen years together. She got the house, but he chose not to fight her over it. He simply moved on, continued to work on building up the role junior colleges would play in the California higher education scheme, and expanded his work as a foreign student advisor by developing expertise in assessing foreign transcripts, a skill which led him to travel and publish on education in Eastern Europe - and, more importantly on the personal front, to meet Ann Koenig, who was working at the University of California, Berkeley, in admissions. Ann would share his work and his life through to the end. And would bring him ultimately to live with her in Berkeley, just minutes from my house. I couldn’t have asked for more, except that I had returned to live once more in Japan now and only saw them during the three months each year I spent in Berkeley.

Unfortunately, that experience, too, had a relatively short shelf-life. Ed and Ann had taken on jobs with a professional agency that worked on foreign student evaluation for American universities, and the company moved to Phoenix, taking them with them. It broke my heart, but we were now accustomed to a long-distance friendship and we stayed in close touch. Ann, fortunately, played the recorder at a professional level, and that brought her to Berkeley a couple times to perform, so she and Ed and I still had a way to get together, if only for very short spells at a time.

As the years went by Ed’s cognitive faculties began to fail and it became clear we were going to have to squeeze what we could out of the half century of friendship while we were still able.

Ann is now grieving Ed’s loss, as is a very large circle of friends to whom Ed brought so much laughter over the years.

You don't know when you meet somebody, no matter how well you hit it off, that you've begun a friendship that's going to endure for decades. You don't know if it will go smoothly, or if it will be filled with ups and downs.

I'm an opinionated person, and I tend to choose friends with strong wills and the inclination to articulate their views forcefully, so I am used to relationships that have their ups and downs. But Ed and I shared the better part of more than half a century together, with a remarkable lack of discord, considering how much of that time we spent in close proximity.I credit that to Ed's ways, his inclination to approach life as an absurdity, never to be taken too seriously. He could get annoyed at people, but he had a way of brushing things off before they got out of hand. It was a remarkable skill, and I learned much from watching him make his way in the world.

Some of the time he could be downright silly, and make me want to be silly, as well. In going through the many years of e-mail correspondence I have archived, I found this exchange from 2008.

Alan to Ed: Sanctuary mush for ze tipp.
Ed to Alan: Es elves, djuvalkom.

And this one, from about that same time: We had been discussing Andrew Sullivan. I sent him an article of Sullivan's and explained the mixed feelings I had about him:

I have a strange relationship with Andrew Sullivan.  (I say relationship, because I feel I know him.  He doesn't know me from a tree.)  For some time I decided he was THE gay Uncle Tom.  Then I got into his books seriously and was moved almost beyond endurance by some of the things he said.  He is a very powerful man with words.

Ed responded, revealing a side of him I was already quite familiar with, a complex jumble of confidence and humility:

Good article to read. I just wish I didn't have such an overwhelming feeling that anyone practicing a God-based religion is a deluded idiot, however nice and upright and charitable she or he may be. If you recall the film "Lawrence of Arabia" (nearly 50 years old now!), Lawrence puts a candle out with his thumb and finger; he is asked, "Doesn't that hurt?" and replies, "Yes, but the secret is not to mind that it hurts." 

So I co-exist less or more happily. I try to help in small ways. I don't get into arguments with simple people trained not to understand much. But there is still a hatred for the hurtful way things happen, even to those who hurt others without thinking. Time is on the side of the bad guys, as Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham jail, but he was a titan and I am not. Neverthess, by God or whatever, I admire the titans without reservation and will help them a little if I can. 

That was Ed in a nutshell. Never getting too big for his boots.

And helping whenever he could.

Nobody will ever replace him.