I’ve been missing my father but have been consoled by the wonderful letters I’ve been receiving from friends of his. One of them, his French Department colleague George Poe, reminded me of an autumn poem that he particularly liked. It gets at the irreverent way that my father treated those in authority.
The University of the South was very proper in the 1950s and 1960s, a bastion of southern male gentility—and yet there was my liberal father, an intruder from the North, showing his erotic films and insisting that the college accept Blacks and women and gays.
Some people in Sewanee thought that my father was the best thing that ever happened to the college and some that he was the worst. “Nuts,” I can imagine him responding.
The Hickory Trees and the Squirrels
By Scott Bates
The Hickory Trees said
Every year
You autumn Squirrels
Get in our hair
Without they said
A seed of sense
You wreck our summer
Permanents
What do you think
We are they said
A big trapeze
Nuts said the Squirrels
To the Hickory Trees
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