Farewell, Godspeed

My response to Paul Greenberg’s death is almost as complicated as my response to the man himself. I moved to Arkansas in 2004, seemingly near the end of the Civil War. Confederate Boulevard was being renamed, and letters to the paper flowed abundantly on the topic of Southern identity. As an outsider, I felt I had to chime in.

Paul responded to my letter in a column titled “Dear Yankee” that ended with “Bless your heart.” Alas, I was already fluent in the Southern dialect and the use of politeness as a weapon. I wrote many letters to the editor and annoyed Paul regularly on email. He sent me a bottle of gin once in thanks for giving him an idea for a column. Our interactions swerved from painful to enjoyable to downright strange.

For most of a year I made regular musical references by email that he answered in his column, a call and response of sorts, à la Fletcher Henderson. It was mesmerizing and it worked, like everything that he wrote; he could make room for so much in his writing. And we both understood the power of music. For if you have lived it, someone has sung it and the song is without flaw, pure and distilled, like Paul’s writing, painfully beautiful and evocative and concise.

One of my favorite pieces was “The Dream,” about trying to reach his wife’s side in a crowded dream party and not making it. He creates the tension and then mixes humor with pain: “But one day, or one night, I’ll make it to her side again. If they’ll just let me up from the underworld to visit.”

So in the spirit of a final journey, “Farewell, Godspeed, and thank you, dearest Paul; in the end it was wholly a pleasure.”

KATHY CURTIN

Fayetteville