Ron

Ron Goba with Tom Daley after a Salon reading in October 2010.

Below are the words I prepared for my introductory piece to Ron Goba's tribute held this past Wednesday on April first at The Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. Though I rehearsed reciting the piece to make sure it was under three minutes, I ad-libbed an anecdote I kept forgetting to add during the various draft phases. I don't have a recording of my reading, so the ad-libbed part has been added according to my very faulty memory.

Ron was a giant who had conquered the world.

On the basketball court. In the school where he taught for decades.

he came into our lives via the Cantab, taking money and attendance, assessing us like the teacher he never stopped being.

Despite the death of his beloved wife Sue—a partner who helped to make everything good in his life possible—it’s easy to say that Ron Goba won the game of life.

He retired from the grind, but he was not a recluse. He was not a bitter outsider cursing the changing world, hoping to die and take the future with them the way so many seem to.

Ron never stopped living or participating in the real world.

He never wanted to stop sharing and passing on his life lessons. In poetry, in history, in armchair football coaching.

If Ron spoke to you, he wanted to share himself as much as you shared yourself on the stage. And he wanted to hear more.

He saw more potential in me than I did in myself. I know many can say the same.

But he wasn’t a mentor or elder interested in making clones of himself.

Ron wanted you to be the best you possible.

And if you ever asserted yourself in your work, or in conversation, I think that pleased him more. 

We're going to miss this quality even more as we move through this new era.

Even being in the company of Ron was the masterclass I should have gotten when I was actually in graduate school. I keep piecing together fragments of his post-workshop conversations. Poetry, of course. Music. The time he spoke in a convention hall filled to standing-room only with people waiting to hear his lecture on the proper placement of the comma. Heady topics like Germany’s Göttingen guhteehen university having its math department in the 40’s purged of “Jewish” influence by a fascist regime to the point that when the minister of education asked how the mathematics department was after the purge, the answer was, well, there was no math department anymore.

What comes around, goes around. Too often.

But the topic I keep trying to remember? Why did Tiger Woods let himself crash his car?

That was his first crash back in 2009. 

I know time is cyclical, but maybe the circle is getting too small to my liking.

We just finished our last unwinnable war after all. 

It’s said the universe will reverse it’s expansion a few billion years from now. The Big Crunch.

I think it’s already happening.

I think that’s why Ron left us. Our world, our universe, our collective vision, compacted, became too small to hold him.

Maybe he’ll return once everyone’s decided to grow up. 

He has more to share, I’m sure.