• The PUP is working great. All modifications are holding up so far, and I hope to make one more this weekend.
• Classes are in full swing. So far so good. 101 is always tough slogging early on while the freshmen get their college legs under them, but they’re a good group.
• My “spare time” life as Jeep armorer required an enormous time crunch that cost me a couple of weeks of sleep … but it seems to be in steady rhythm now.
• The wee lass took a significant blow to the head from one of those “carriage” swings. I wasn’t there, but apparently the poor thing was shot airborne. Seems to be fine now, though, other than one big ol’ scab across half her forehead.
• I’m about 1/3 finished with a super secret new novel project.
• I did a heavy edit on the introduction to a scholarly edition of a medieval Italian text I cannot actually read.
• Another of my undergraduates got a paper he wrote for me accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.  So many students have the potential, but few take me up on it when I tell them that if they work with me — writing, rewriting, researching, and rewriting some more — there’s a good chance I can get them in print.  This young man took the challenge and succeeded.

And last but not least…

• Tonight I finished the first (and perhaps last) draft of a paper I’m presenting in mid-November. I’m never this far ahead!

At any rate, all this is prelude to the announcement that the 2010 Shako is now in the wild. It’s a terrific year, with some great fiction, poetry, photography, and even some artwork. Indeed, our cover art is the work of a talented freshman here on campus. I touched it up and added a bit of antiquity and mystery to the piece, but it was awesome raw material to work with — I’m greatly pleased with the results.

If you’re on campus, you’ll find copies piled around the lobbies of Mark Clark Hall, in the English office, in the sally ports, in my office, and being handed out around parade time tomorrow morning. Enjoy!

Front Cover of the 2010 Shako!

Noah also gave a version of the paper alongside professorial types at the recent PAC conference, and he’s preparing a larger version of it for submission to peer-reviewed academic journals. Plus, he’s a finalist for a Truman.

Congratulations, Noah!

This particular student is actually a knob (Citadel-talk for “freshman”) in my English 101 class of all things: a jolly good chap named James Tomlinson, who has a brief article in the most recent edition of The Lesser Squawk, the newsletter (circulation over 1200) of the Charleston Audubon Society. His article (you’ll eventually be able to read it online) is a report on simple ways for folks to save energy, a “go green” to save the planet sort of piece. This, in itself, is pretty interesting, since most folks probably think the students at El Cid are card-carrying, hard-right, ultra-conservative right-wing-nuts who’d be liable to deny environmental concerns.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is the story about how this happened, which starts over a beer out at the beach.

No, it wasn’t with young Mr. Tomlinson. And no, I’m not encouraging drinking. The beer was had in a social setting out at The Citadel’s beach house, during our yearly “Welcome Back, Faculty!” gathering. I was talking to people here and there when I happened across Paul Nolan, a clever ornithologist in the Biology Department. We came to El Cid at the same time, so we’ve been friends over the years. Anyway, after a bit of chit-chat, Paul notes that he’s now the president of the Charleston Audubon Society. Quite cool, of course. Then he tells me about The Lesser Squawk, the society’s newsletter. “You know,” he says (or close to it, I’m paraphrasing my memory), “if you have any students who could write something for it, we should talk.”

Well, any student is capable of crafting publishable work. So we talked some more, and eventually I had concocted a plan to have my two 101 classes select subjects for their third essay that would be suitable for an Audubon Society newsletter. We had a simple competition: the best essay would go to the editor of the Squawk.

Well, congratulations to Mr. Tomlinson. He won, and they accepted the essay for publication.

I immediately went through several stages, from thinking it was some sort of sick joke to hoping it was someone other than my former student Cameron Matthew Anestis — selfishly hoping it was the loss of a young man I didn’t know rather than one I’d grown to respect so deeply.

After midnight, I had the confirmation I feared via a brief online obituary:

ANESTIS Cameron Matthew, 21, Georgetown, KY, loving husband of Tiffany Elaine Anestis and father of Isabelle Skye Anestis, died Mon, Aug 17, 2009. Born in Manchester, NH, he was the son of Emmanuel John and Dawn Sidway Anestis of Lexington, KY. Cameron attended The Citadel Military College of South Carolina and served in the Iraq War for 8 months as a U.S. Marine. Survivors other than his wife, daughter, and parents include a sister, Kalyn Anestis; two brothers, Evan and Christian Anestis, all of Lexington, KY; paternal grandmother, Irene Anestis, Boston, MA; and maternal grandparents, William and Delores Sidway, Enfield, CT. He was preceded in death by his paternal grandfather, John Emmanuel Anestis.

I know no details of his passing beyond these simple facts, but more information would do little more than add footnotes to the terrible, tragic, undeniable fact of his death.

It is unlikely that I’ll be able to attend his funeral in Kentucky tomorrow morning, and of course they’d hardly know me if I did.  I had Cameron twice in my classes here at The Citadel, but I’m not so arrogant as to think that his family heard about me one way or another.  At the same time, I feel a duty to say something here about Cameron, if only for the chance that perhaps his family in their mourning might read it and know something more about the impact their son made in his time here. Perhaps one day even young Isabelle, wanting to know something of the father that was taken from her too soon, will read it, too.  I fear it’s all I can do.

I met Cameron in my first semester here at The Citadel, in the Fall of 2006, in one of my English 101 courses. In a sea of trimmed hair, grey uniforms, and slightly shell-shocked faces, he impressed me at once. There was a self-confidence in the way he carried himself, a strength that made itself apparent on the very first day.  I remember that there were two female cadets in the class, and one of them decided to sit right up front, right under my nose.  When no one else would sit at the table beside her — because of her gender or my looming proximity, I don’t know — it was Mr. Anestis who did so. I liked him right away, of course, but I found even more cause to like him as the semester went on. Whenever there was a question or a call for volunteers, no matter the task, I could count on Cameron to raise his hand. Whenever a fellow student needed help, I could be sure that he would do whatever he could to help them.  No matter the day, no matter the occasion, I could count on him to be, in every sense of the word, present. Cameron was a “red badger” — as I fondly call our Marine-contract cadets — and you could see the aspiration to serve his country well in nearly every aspect of what he did in my class, in every occasion we sat down to chat in my office. Disciplined, controlled, kind, and clever, he was, in a word, professional.  For a new professor, lost at sea here in so many ways, Anestis provided a steady anchor.  He could not possibly have known how much easier he made my life that first year.

I got to know him well through that semester and the following one, the Spring of 2007, when he insisted on enrolling in my English 102 course (“I stayed up all night to be sure I got in yours, sir,” he told me).  I learned about his love of baseball and his excellence at the sport as a young teenager.  I learned how his joining the Armed Forces had been difficult on his family, but I also learned how they had come to accept his choice. One of the greatest things that had happened to him, he once said, was learning that his father was proud of him.

In the Spring term we studied Woody Allen’s play “Death Knocks.”  The play is a simple one: New Yorker Nat Ackerman is surprised one evening when a man dressed in black falls in through his window, claiming to be “Death.” Though Death insists that it’s Nat’s time to die, Nat parries him off again and again with witty twists of logic. The two of them decide to play gin rummy with Nat’s life as the stake — a mock of the Death-playing-chess scene in cinema — and Death loses badly, with Nat sending him off into the wilds of New York to return again another night. Several students wrote papers on the play, all of them seeing it — as indeed I had presented it in class — as a light-hearted piece:  Allen, they said, was one way or another dismissing the human fear of death. All of the students, that is, but Mr. Anestis. In an essay entitled “The Meaning of Life,” Cameron eloquently argued that Allen’s point was not to dismiss our fears of this world, but to learn from them that the central message of life is to embrace what little time we’re given.

He was right, of course.  And for all that Cameron Matthew Anestis gave in life — for his service, for his kindness, for the words and memories and people he leaves behind — I cannot thank him enough.