the road to Foster's place

The road to Foster's place is 2.4 miles 8 minutes with traffic. But he's not there anymore. He's here. One of the things I wanted to do while passing through Eugene was look up David Foster, emeritus professor of art at U of O, because of his influence in my life. I remember visiting David on my way back from taking the professional knowledge test in Portland, just after moving here from England. I was the first person at Southern Oregon offered this quick method of proving you were qualified to teach. They weren't set up for the test in Ashland yet, so I had to drive the six hours north. Now I'm hesitating because I can't remember how it turned out we went to breakfast together...and he paid, which I appreciated, living on substitute teacher pay and my wife's three part time jobs at the coffee shop, the used clothing store and the bagel shop. On the way to breakfast David was talking non-stop about opportunities, how I was like a prairie dog sticking his head up through the surface and looking around. Things looked good. While he was talking I remember thinking about Ezekiel sticking his head through the clouds and discovering heaven's machinery, the gears and cogs and how everything worked. David was like that, as curious and fearless as a child, with all the wisdom of someone who'd been through the war and trained up with the Bauhaus movement, to name a couple. We crossed the street, first waiting for the crosswalk sign to illuminate. Nothing was sacred or really you could say the opposite of David, everything was sacred. I said Aren't you alarmed at these modern judgement saving devices, or words to that effect. Like being told when it was all right to cross a road, whether there was traffic in the street or not. He looked at me and said, I pick and choose, and that's one I can live with. I'm okay with that. I'll be happy to wait for the all clear. There's other things I do where I make my own judgements, but this is one I'm fine leaving to the city.

When I first met him he came literally vibrating with quiet energy and force into our small college. I saw him right away as my revered teachers' mentor. He ran a film class in the evenings and it was well attended. He began with hand-painted frames, moved through Fritz Lang and Orson Welles and on from there. I'm not a film buff in any way, but he gave me a grasp on film's antecedents. Elsewhere on campus he supervised the building of the dark room where I would later spend hours alone stirring Russell Kaine's photographs around for the yearbook.

David had a sort of Hemingway appearance, with the teacher's shrewd eye, turning everything you said or did into an opportunity to learn. He was I would say swarthy, a working artist. Back at his house after breakfast, I noticed the lights went on each time we entered a room, and went out when the last person exited. Typical David. His house was basically fully packed with computer gear and art project materials, a printing press in the basement.

Over the years we exchanged Christmas cards. His were always homemade. A piece of wisdom along with one of his fascinating sketches. He was internationally known for taking his modified VW van out into the wild and running photographs through his computer and then to a kind of sketch pad he devised. It was like a marriage of what he'd seen and what he wanted to illustrate. He had a kind of Chinese landscape sense of economy and his work was beautiful, frame-able. And of course I was honored to be included in his mailing list, which must have been vast.

The thing is I can't remember when I stopped hearing from David. We moved states and I attributed not hearing from him to that break. So now I'm hear and he's on my list. I touch his address in my contact application and the journey to his house looks like a brush stroke with some angularity reaching into the east. But for some reason before setting out I enter his name in Google to discover that David G. Foster died in 2003, on the shortest day of the year. He was 78.

He was killed crossing the street.

I'm heading out of town now, over to the coast where I'm going to do some writing and some walking. Maybe I'll take out my iPad and do some sketching in David's honor. I'm just sticking my head up through the surface and looking around. It's a beautiful day and you're never too old to cry for an old friend, but would they want that? Time to move on, glad I knew him.