“You’re right,” I said. “You grab the Miro, I’ll get the Goya...”

Ira, nudging us out like a mother hen, undoubtedly thought we were being childish, but Debra and I continued to be silly and, probably because we were a little nervous that we might really be in danger, even morbid. “Wouldn’t that be something,” she said in a near whisper, at once sly and wistful, “dying among these masterpieces?”

The alarm was false (had Ira pulled it?), and all was safe, but we decided to get back to the hotel and not risk missing another inspiring PowerPoint presentation.

I had not known Debra long then, but her reactions that day revealed something about her that I came to cherish in years to follow--her love for contrasting textures. That day in Washington she delighted in the clash of aural images: the warm, comforting tones of cello and violin attacked by the icy and threatening blast of siren. She loved the conceptual juxtaposition of unlikely pairings of symbols as well: art’s attempt to lift us above the mundane against the fire alarm’s undeniable power to snatch us down; art pointing toward our longing for the eternal, fire’s reminder of our utter finitude. Once in New Orleans at another conference, I witnessed her appreciation for the tactile when we passed a decoration on a wrought iron gate. The small sculpture of nudes in a Rodinesque embrace had harsh, unpolished surfaces, almost like cracked quartz. Adoring lovers married in rough metal was too inviting for Debra to pass up. She rubbed her hands over this marriage of tenderness and coarseness, then joked that the owner may rush out and accuse her of trespassing. Nowhere is the love she had for texture more evident than in her poetry. She often placed words and phrases in abrasive couplings for sound effect--guttural, short Anglo-Saxon grating against mellifluous,

polysyllabic Latinate. She also tended to construct her poems around concrete images that wedded the sweet to bitter, sharp to soft: a lover’s gift that injures the recipient, children’s cacophony contrasted with mother’s quiet love, a leaf whose changing color causes both its beauty and its demise, music alternating from joy to despair. At first glance most of her poems seem simple paeans to love and longing. The language is accessible, the themes common. With further readings, though, complexities and tensions slowly emerge, and the poems become portraits in verse of the woman herself: light and sensitive, but ultimately conjoined to the dark and perilous. Their linguistic frictions reflect the dialectics she detected in special events, those in which she reveled in everyday experience, and those burning within her whose warmth we are only now able to feel.

Debra wrote the following poem about our visit to the Phillips Collection. Not only an example of how a perceptive writer makes fertile literary ground from an unlikely source, the poem also gives us a clue into the mind of an enigma of textures and contrasts, a metaphysical conceit become flesh, a woman whose life, to borrow a line from another of her poems, was a “mosaic of pain and grace.”

Afternoon at the Phillips
Washington, D.C.

It's winter and I'm weary of icy sidewalks,
sleet and Potomac slush. Cold stairwells and dead
Sundays. Nothing's reborn. No cherry blossoms
blow their white sails against my boot's shore.
I trudge along to the museum, my head down
for I must lobby the god of ice and men not to slip
from this life with a heart as cold as hell.

Inside this mansion, I shed my skin of ice
and warm to a quartet that plays Bach:
his whispers of joy, of longing and despair
and joy again--of the coming of spring
and laughter, a bottle of wine by the water,
its blue a light aria rising over flute-like trees
forever and ever--

Of a sudden a fire alarm pierces the mood
in the gallery, returning time to cello and color.
Before the golds and reds of Miro, I stop:
if I must die, why not here and now?
Let this blaze consume me! But it’s a cry
of wolf, a false alarm, a second chance
--the real fire burns in me

During my adjuncting years at CFCC, I often answered the phone to a wonderfully husky voice apprising me of events in our division, or, as was more likely, asking me if I would co-sign on some sort of grant scheme. Debra loved to have writers visit, and from time to time she needed more money to pay these people. She felt that two signatures on the grant request would be more enticing, and she would promise that all I had to do was sign the paperwork. And show up at the event. And bring all my students. I did this, often without reading what I was requesting. I am sure that I am co-owner in some sort of land deal somewhere.

Debra was my mentor and my friend. She was what I am not. She was sensual, a lover of textures, sensations, colors. I was sometimes almost embarrassed by the way she could revel in these sensations. Her poems contained images of perfume nestled between breasts like a lover, and characters ripping filters off cigarettes to feel the raw smoke in their lungs. She described tile the color of the Mediterranean and long-married couples going at it like teenagers in the back seat of a car. I wrote the poem “Ir A Un Entierro” (part of which is below) for Debra’s fiftieth birthday, and it jokes about our differences. The title, in Spanish because Debra was bilingual, literally means “to the grave,” but it carries the idiomatic meaning to have sex. The poem celebrates Debra's sensuality while aging, and jokes about my own uneasiness at growing older.

I am 301 in dog years. Given that I look good for my age. A friend turning fifty lifts her shirt To show her leopard print teddy. We discuss thongs and whisper Victoria’s secrets.

Last semester, Debra sent Ron an e-mail. He forwarded it to me with the request that I translate because, he said, “you speak ‘Debra.’” Debra and I laughed because I had understood her message immediately. Unfortunately though, Ron was wrong. I might have been able to translate “Debra,” but I will never be able to speak it.

During one of those classroom visitation weeks a few years back, I decided to visit classes on the Ocala campus--to see what was going on in the big city, and to hopefully learn “how it was done.” Hey, they didn’t have faculty mentoring or anything like that when I started here full-time. Treating myself to a room at the Hilton allowed me the full experience of observing both evening and morning classes.

I went to a Greek mythology lecture given by John Mathews, and was impressed with his dramatic account of the parentage of the misbegotten Minotaur. I also visited Amy Mangan’s history class, having been intrigued by her Summer Fantasy project earlier that summer, a power point (back when that was the “bomb”) presentation combining music and history. Sadly, my visit was short, as Amy planned on working with the students individually that day.

At that time, I was working on a team-taught course with Scott Smith, Susan Cable and Scott Olsen, and wanted to go to one of their classes. But I figured I wouldn’t understand much of what they were doing anyway--calabi yaus and some things called D.E.’s, so I settled finally on Debra Vazquez’ Creative Writing class. After all, she was a poet, she advised Imprints, and besides, anything with “creative” in front of it had to be doable for an artsy type like me.

We started with an exercise designed to draw out our recollections of past experiences.

I walked through the weirdly slanting add-on pantry behind the dining room, where she served fried chicken and pecan pie. I peered through the low front windows and up the steep hill, to the latter-era highway running through rural Centerville Alabama.

Even though I had been in the house just a few years ago, after it had been abandoned by some low-renters, these 30-year old memories were infinitely sharper.

That same evening she introduced the class to something called a Pantoum. It turned out to be a poetry word game, dating to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. You take the first line of a poem, and rearrange the words and/or syllables to create the next line, and end up with an overall pattern. This reminded me of Mozart’s use of dice combinations for creating little dance minuets, with his typically aristocratic penchant for intellectual games, so characteristic of the Enlightenment era.

What lucky students, I thought, as I left her class at the break to return to my hotel room.

Although I vowed to get to know Debra Vazquez better; other than a few minutes in between sessions at the annual student newspaper and magazine conventions, I didn’t. But my visit to her class left me with a lasting impression of her--a dynamic teacher, an innovative enabler of individuality, and a trusted mentor to her writing students.

“Debra was passionate about life and expressed her passion through her writing, her teaching, and her interest in others.  She had a way of making others feel important to her. Despite her personal turmoil, Debra radiated happiness and made others just feel good. She accepted people on their own terms and respected their privacy while maintaining a connection with them.  I had many wonderful conversations with her, many short-lived moments I treasure. A part of me is feeling sorry for myself because I had so much more to learn from her, and I am going to miss her dearly.”

- Judy Haisten

Her Fifteen Minutes Since youth she’d burned with a fire to write her verse and set it free with outstretched hands as it rises up and up and casts its broad rhymes Like wild flames spreading out until everything takes on the untold joy of sheer whiteness. This evening all is still before her, reading to a room, packed hair to hair. So what if she must share this hour with another? She knows her time when it comes, her one lifetime dream. Words rise within her, then the wind through her silver hair while she winds among the stars, the moon under her feet, brief shining embers… Debra Allen Vazquez May 20, 1954 ~ July 4, 2004

The CFCC Book Club begins its third year this fall 2004. The book club offers the faculty, staff and community the opportunity to read and discuss literary works in an informal setting. We meet in the PDC, Building 1-101 from noon to 1 p.m. Our September discussion will be held in Building 7, Room 111 to accommodate others who wish to discuss this learning theme book.

For further information about the CFCC Book Club, please email Amy Mangan, magana@cf.edu.

September 24 - Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich

A respected journalist goes undercover to find the answer to the question: Can a single working woman survive on minimum wage. Ehrenreich articulately explores the crisis of the working poor women in America while revealing a sobering look at the great divide between the rich and the poor.

Facilitator: Amy Mangan

October 29 - Moors Last Sigh by Salmon Rushdie

The Moor lives out a unique fate; he is doomed to go through his life at double-speed. Aged thirty-six, but with the physique of a seventy-two-year-old, he narrates the fantastic story of his life within a family who exemplify the glorious plurality of India: his mother, India's greatest artist, comes from a Portuguese line descended on the wrong side of the sheet from Vasco da Gama, while his father is one of the ancient community of Cochin Jews, and is also an illegitimate descendant--possibly--of Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. Moraes, like his ancestor Boabdil, looks back at the end of his life upon his brilliant, ruined family and on the India he knew as a young man, a lost paradise of possibilities which has been squandered through the human sins of hatred, factionalism, and ethnic and religious intolerance. (www.randomhouse.com)

Facilitator: Ron Cooper

November 19 - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, translated from the original French (the book was a bestseller in France) is a tale centered on, of all things, the Cultural Revolution of China’s Chairman Mao Zedong. Anyone who takes for granted the freedom from government that Western cultures enjoy would do well to read this book. But this wonderful novel (novella really) is not about politics, except in a cursory way; nor is it a treatise on the evils of China during the reign of Chairman Mao. It is, instead, a gentle, wise and humorous tale of two teenaged friends, young boys, and of a young teenaged girl, the seamstress of the title, whose striking beauty charms them both. (http://www.curledup.com/balzac.htm)

Facilitator: Mary Ann DeSantis

December - Book donation and party at Amy’s house.

“PUN” READING? The University of Findlay, Ohio’s business department has a sense of humor—let’s hope they managed to keep it during the first week of school! Taken by Sandy Pell while visiting daughter Katie’s college in August.