When my daughter, Zoë, was about two months old, one of the graduate students had a party. I don’t remember whom, but there was plenty of good brew and greasy food. I was only in my second year of teaching and a little uneasy, having been pregnant for all of my first year at UIC. A member of the ‘have it all’ mindset, the stress of being a working mom in a university without daycare was just dawning on me. I was a typical, frenzied, first-time mom. I remember that Peter grabbed tiny Zoe with confidence. She fell asleep in his arms and we sat on a frayed, green couch and talked about SoHo in the seventies (he had lived there too), our shared love of guitar music (he was also a musician), the joys of touring by bicycle (he was warming up to that), performance art and the incredible pleasure of a life in books. That was 1995 and versions of that moment played out over and over and over the years. My girls always looked forward to seeing him at department events. He was handsome, brash, opinionated and knew something about everything and everything about some things. That’s nineteen years ago. That little baby is in college now and grieved his passing with me. “I’ve known him forever” is what she said.

I came to trust Peter in that most private place of academics…the rough draft. Peter was the first reader of my first and third books. He could be trusted that way, responding with illegible lines that somehow swirled out the general sense of “Yes, this works” an upward swish of broad curve, a check or a star, and “are you freakin’ kidding?!” clearly indicated with a big X, a NO, something squiggly up the side, or even (was it once or more?) a frown or what I took for a frown, bisected and angled lines across the bottom. That image of his pen dancing lightly across other people’s writing is one that really sticks. He was a kind of choreographic advisor to other people’s mental gymnastics, whether the thing landed with an ignoble ‘thud!’ or took flight.

Astonishing narratives hung on and around Peter like so many flickering lights. Like that department function nineteen years ago, my most vivid memories involve his story telling. Like the time he was pulled over in a van in Texas. Or the Quaker meeting, his kids’ escapades with friends or abroad. Was it Africa? Taylor’s mountaintop wedding. Molly’s travails with doctors. While I don’t recall the details of these stories, I recall vividly the explosive enthusiasm with which he told them. Since leaving Chicago, these would be shared far and wide in his Facebook reflections, shared, as they were, with an ever wider circle o f friends. Pure poetry. Really fun. Lovely.

Remembered by Hannah B Higgins

-- Hannah B Higgins Professor, Interim Chair School of Art and Art History (m/c 201) University of Illinois Chicago 929 West Harrison Street Chicago, IL 60607-7039