Commentary by Roger Martin Martin writes about research at KU for Kansas media and in a webzine. Contact Martin at rmartin@kucr.ku.edu or (785) 864-7239. Martin also can be heard on KANU 91.5 FM public radio Archives More articles by Roger Martin Subscribe now to receive KU News by email

Writer's wood elves and sparrows inspire resolution

by Roger Martin

Resolution: I will be more like Brian Doyle in the year 2001.

Brian is editor of Portland, the alumni magazine of the University of Portland, and is very Catholic, married, with kids. He's got another back surgery coming up pretty soon. This gimpiness means I can't lure him out here to the Midwest for a visit.

"Flying and me," he says, "are not friends."

The other day, a person wrote to me, "I saw Brian in St. Louis in 1998. He's scruffy and a little too short for me, but so was Serpico -- he looks like Serpico. Brian read this tribute to his wife that made me cry."

I've never met him. I know him entirely and solely by his words. I first met them in 1987 when I judged a contest that he'd entered. Our correspondence began shortly after. Once, when I suggested we exchange pictures so we'd have an image of each other, he refused. He wanted me to continue to exist only in his imagination, he said.

The core of my fondness for Brian comes from his writing sentences like this one: "My daughter Lily, once the size of a salmon, is now the size of a wood elf. In the morning we exchange food; I ladle oatmeal into her sparrow mouth and she carefully smears pears on my head."

In Brian's world, it's hard to tell the men, women, children, sparrows, salmon and wood elves apart. All beings, sprung from a common root, regard each other tenderly.

This could get syrupy, but Brian also has an eye that sees the fun in things. Here's a bedtime-story scenario with Lily: "We read the same four books every night, all of which feature the moon in a heroic capacity."

The joke is light and lyrical. My own sense of humor is more like a safe plunging from a fourth-story window toward an innocent bystander. I don't do light and lyrical, but I love it in Brian.

He and I are both in higher-education public relations, but at his best he far transcends the profession. Nobody but Brian would think to describe a grave marker as "stone above bone." He never saw a pine marten except in pictures and in his imagination and yet still managed to describe one as "a fist of grace and energy in the wet woods." In short, Brian does justice to his university because he offers vision.

His world is coherent, and its mortar is The Good. His God is large, muscular and in-your-face, a spirit who pours himself generously into every cranny of creation. His faith is so high-altitude that it makes me dizzy.

As I muse on the coming year, I think of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Sometimes I feel like one of those man-apes we see at the start of the show, the ones tossing bones around. In my own simian way, I too often brood, pine, blame, seethe. My soul can be so pinched that it appalls me. And so I envy the soul of Brian, a big-spirited man I've never seen and whose reality I sometimes doubt.

What Jack Nicholson said to Helen Hunt in the movie "As Good as It Gets," I could say of Brian: You make me want to be a better man.

Maybe 2001 will be the year that happens.