THE UNION OF OKLA ELLIOTT CHAUFFEURS
A euology read at the memorial service for Okla
at Misericordia University on March 24th, 2017

by Glenn Willis

 

 

I’m pretty sure I was asked to say something about Okla because Okla appreciated liberal politics, and because I myself have been a union member.

The union to which I have belonged is little known, though there are several members in attendance here today. My union colleagues Matt Hinton and Rebecca Padot send their sincere regrets that they are unable to be here today. However, we do have a number of union members in attendance: Ryan Watson, Patrick Hamilton, Jennifer Black, Matt Nickel, Matt Swanson, Scott Blanchard, and perhaps unknown others, have served with me as members of this vital and selective labor union.  I refer, of course, to the Union of Okla Elliott Chauffeurs—it is a union that might be called the Local Okle.

The union, now disbanded, was dedicated to ensuring that Okla received rides, occasionally at strange hours, to grocery stores, Mexican restaurants, beer emporiums, and various regional residences. Members were regularly paid by Dr. Elliott in cups of coffee and in passionate lectures on the virtues of Bernie Sanders. Matt Hinton, in a note to me last night, recalled that he first picked up Okla from a bus stop on Dallas Memorial Highway on the afternoon of July 24, 2015: “Okla,” Matt writes, “was carrying little more than a large iced coffee, a knapsack, and a book the size of a Buick.”

The problem, you may perceive, was that Okla had a lot of books the size of Buicks, but no actual Buicks.

I should admit that this sometimes confused me: why couldn’t this guy just be normal, and buy himself a crappy used car, like every other humanities scholar?

Okla was in the world but somehow not fully of it. Okla and I joined the university together in the summer of 2015, and we developed a sense of camaraderie with other new faculty members in the humanities and social sciences like Ryan Watson, Margot Wielgus, George Shea, Rebecca Padot, and Dana Chalupa. So I asked those friends to tell me something about their response to Okla’s presence in their lives.

Dana described Okla’s relentlessly kind reassurances to her, as she began her work at Misericordia, and his many invitations to her to join dinner parties with his expanding set of friends in Wilkes Barre.  “In all of our conversations,” Dana wrote, “Okla made me feel welcomed and included.”

Okla enjoyed drawing attention to the ridiculousness of life. Ryan Watson wrote to me about Okla’s occasional practice of shaving both his beard and his head all at once. The first time this happened, as Okla walked down our shared hallway, Ryan had no idea who Okla was, and Okla started to smile as he approached: Ryan finally recognized him and said, "Oh my god, you're completely smooth—like a seal." After that, each time Okla shaved so comprehensively again, he would make sure to lean into Ryan’s office suddenly, smile, and announce that ‘the seal is back!’”

Margot wrote to me that “At a dinner party with colleagues from Wilkes University, Okla unabashedly admitted that he had published teen vampire stories under a pseudonym on Amazon. Those in attendance responded with laughter. But Okla insisted that horror stories, and vampires in particular, speak to the human fear of mortality before otherworldly power. Even in Okla’s teen vampire work,” Margot reflects, “as in all his work and conversation, he sought to come to terms with the human condition.”

Mischelle Anthony, one of Okla’s friends from Wilkes University, wrote to me that Okla “was a joyful vortex of sincere, rare intelligence.” Mischelle also tells me that a number of Starbucks baristas in Wilkes Barre send their sincere condolences to the Misericordia community.

Many of us admired Okla for his passionate commitment to writing, to discussion, and to his students, whom he loved.  But my sense is that we loved Okla because, as George Shea noted to me, Okla was someone around whom it was very difficult to feel despair or hopelessness. George concluded his note to me by saying, “I’m really going to miss that crazy bastard.”

Okla overcame a lot in his life. He was mysteriously indomitable; I will always see him as wholly undefeated. The second-century French bishop and theologian, Irenaeus of Lyons, wrote that ‘The glory of God is the human being fully alive…’ In one of his own later poems, Okla wrote,

                                      I have become a mystic
                                      a perfect destiny
                                      after all these years
                                      of studied incredulity.

Okla knew that there is an awful lot of studied incredulity in the world, and not always enough joy, passion, or exuberant welcome. Okla was a human being gloriously and fully alive.

And so I only wish to say, as one former member of the Union of Okla Elliott Chauffeurs, that I would give a great deal to give Okla a ride home from work tonight.

 

 

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