EULOGYS Read at Alan's Service
Anne Buster’s Eulogy
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Burning the Old Year, an appropriate New Years reading - she says “Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts.” My father died suddenly after a long waning and his absence is loud in my life.
My father was a unique man, when my parents were engaged my mother’s mother said after meeting him - well he’s not handy is he? And it's true he did not teach me to ride a bike or drive a car. The first curse word I remember hearing is when he tried to repair a window. Instead he taught me a love of literature and a moral code of honesty and responsibility. In Whitman’s Song of Myself it says “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” and in this vein I do not want his eulogy to be only a list of his virtues for it takes away his humanity. Alan could be wishy-washy, an enabler, indecisive and ineffectual. He was a drinker. He was moral sometimes to a point of being tedious. When I was a girl a homeless man asked if he could take a newspaper from the box. My father put a quarter in, opened the box, removed his own paper and then closed the box. The man was about to complain when my father produced another quarter from his pocket and bought the man a newspaper. The man was astonished and said “Nobody does that!” Alan gave money to anyone who asked him, although often with an included lecture. He was formal and wore a tie and dress shirt most days and he would often get dressed in a dress shirt and slacks even for a day at home. In my haughty teenage years I disliked his softness, and I saw him as a nice guy who finished last. But looking at my childhood in hindsight, he was the constant, the one who drove me to school, who cooked most meals, who shopped, who bought my clothes albeit at the cheapest possible expense, who never said no to any whim or need I had, who nurtured me into being. He read to me every night of my childhood and when we went on trips together as a young woman. Reading aloud was a large part of my parents’ relationship to each other and to us children. One of my earliest memories is being about 3 and Alan reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to my brother and I, which terrified and thrilled me. We read Roald Dahl and James Herriott, Madeleine L'engle and E. Nesbit. He did every voice in Dickens, bringing David Copperfield and Little Nell to life, and tearing up over Tiny Tim at Christmas.
Alan was born in Houston, Texas in 1945. He grew up in the small town of Morgan’s Point on the Texan coast and went to Robert E Lee high school. He loved studying and reading but disliked school. He got his Bachelor’s from Oberlin, and went on to Middlebury for his Masters Degree, began his doctoral degree at Boston College and finished it at the University of Virginia. He did his dissertation on the writings of a nineteenth century naval officer, named Captain Marryat. He still has a framed picture of him in his office. Alan met my mother at Middlebury college, at Breadloaf writer’s conference, in the summer of 1968 and proposed to her the day they met. She said no but a year later gave a different answer. My parents were married for 55 years. They had a unique rapport that was intensely intellectual. They read to each other and my father encouraged my mother’s writing. Our house was filled with books and their combined knowledge of literature was vast.
I regularly went with my father to school and I often think of him in the classroom. Watching him teach Hamlet was a defining event in my life. Year after year I would hear him tell how in Hamlet, Shakespeare was telling us that character is destiny, and I felt inspired to shape my own character in order to create my own destiny. In teaching Romantic poetry for many years my father read a poem by Wordsworth in class called We Are Seven. It is a poem about a child who although her siblings are separated and two are dead, pronounces that they are still seven though parted in this life. Each year he would sit on the corner of his desk in his classroom and read this poem and each year he would cry, which charmed his students all the more. In life he wasn’t as open about his emotions but with literature he was utterly unashamed by them. As a teacher he was beloved. He gave stimulating lectures and enjoyed when his students were passionate about literature. He could be a tease and enjoyed waking students suddenly who dared to sleep in his class. He wrote a recommendation for every student that ever asked him and usually spent much of his school breaks occupied with them and with endless paper grading. He enjoyed writing pithy remarks on student papers and was quick to critique and quick to praise.
He was always responsible, someone who tirelessly tried to always do the right thing. He called his mother every Sunday when she was alive. He attended church at St Victor’s in West Hollywood with my mother for over 30 years, taking the collection, and bringing the gifts of bread and wine to the altar, while never being interested in converting to Catholicism.
His own faith like many intellectuals came closest to Deism but he enjoyed the ceremony and particularly the music in church. My father was passionate about classical music. As a young man he worked as a DJ at a classical music radio station. He always played classical in the car and religiously listened to the opera every weekend on KUSC. He introduced my wife to Opera, playing her the famous aria from Lakme because it was a love song between two women. He could play most instruments adequately and played the clarinet beautifully in his early years. He could identify most classical pieces by ear.
He didn’t like the title of caregiver but he certainly was one. He helped care for my maternal grandmother and cared for my mother when she became addlepated. My childhood was filled with visiting old people who he doted on.
He became friends with his department chair at Marlborough, Cecil Carnes, and visited her weekly when he found she had no other visitors. He had a gift for speaking to the elderly, keeping up a conversation peppered with current events, reminiscences and jokes. I asked him once how he did it and he said that he rehearsed beforehand as he might be their only visitor and he wanted to be interesting. In his later years when I visited him weekly I remembered this and I tried to live up to it. When my son was born he would come and care for him once a week every week, so I could have a break. He loved babies and was excellent with Bennett when he was a small boy.
Although so much of his life was caretaking he identified as a writer and educator first. He worked as a teacher at Marlborough, Westlake and then Harvard-Westlake. He taught AP English Language and Literature and he worked for the college board for a decade helping write the tests and grade them. He traveled internationally with the college board, to Japan, Germany, Indonesia and all over the US, giving seminars on how to teach AP English.
He edited and proofread books for colleagues, friends and students and is thanked in the acknowledgments of numerous books. He wrote entries for the Dictionary of American Biography and spent huge amounts of time researching his subjects.
After he retired he traveled with my mother to Italy and up the California coast. He also traveled with my wife and sons to Hawaii regularly. He loved travel and often recalled his early journeys with his family when they traveled to Europe via freighter. My parents stopped traveling when my mother’s dementia became more serious and Alan devoted himself to her care until we had to move her into memory care. After she had moved he lived a smaller, quieter life but maintained a joy in current events, politics and film.
He never liked to cause a hassle and he would have been very happy to die so quickly and he would have appreciated the appropriateness of leaving this world on Black Friday. He was a unique and brilliant man and I am grateful to have had to have him as a parent.
Karen Longley’s Eulogy
I was fortunate to be Alan Buster's younger sister. We were born only 16 months apart to older parents. In fact all the adults around us were older so Pete and Karen, cute as we were, were considered a double item. Pete was born with the gift of speech, and he early on developed a large vocabulary and a confident presence. I was shy and quiet and a bit clueless. He guided me through the world of childhood. I think the combination of having a little sister and older female relatives developed a natural caretaking tendency in Pete. When my heavyset corseted grandmother fell over on a Christmas tree hunt in the nearby woods, four year old Pete reassured her with the words, "Don't worry--I'll think of something." Around the same age, he woke in the middle of the night, walked down two flights of stairs in the dark, down the hill to the beach. There some teenages--in fact the sons of the Houston mayor--asked him if he wanted to go floundering with them. This involves a sharp gaff and lanterns to spot the flat fish in the bay shallows. Of course he wanted to go. My earliest memory is being awakened at 2 am by my panicked parents and the police asking if I knew where Pete was. No, I did not, but he was eventually returned. Pete loved an adventure.
From early on, my brother had an outgoing personality, natural poise, a concern for others, and a precocious intellect. He was my mother's favorite, the joy of his aunts, every teacher's pet, and yet well liked by his classmates. It wasn't long before I went from half of "Pete and Karen" to just "Pete's sister". One might imagine I could harbor some resentments, but it was very hard to dislike Pete. In fact, I fell right in line and dearly loved and appreciated him. Because this is a eulogy, I won't mention the time he crashed my car, backed over my trumpet, appropriated my stereo to play opera, or sang to me while I did his share of the dishwashing. Neither will I mention that at the age of three, I tried to kill him with a child-sized garden hoe. I don't think Pete would want us to dwell on the negatives. He was too kind to hold grudges and too dear and entertaining to be mad at.
Despite his many gifts, Pete had a hard time organizing himself. When a teacher brought this and his perpetual lateness to my mother's attention, she quickly switched schools. Our new high school was a large football centered Texas school, funded by Humble Oil. Pete went from marching alongside me in band to being the stadium announcer for the routines. The high school was not a good fit for either of us, but Pete made the best of it.
His speech teacher led him to an American Standard pronunciation and many debate wins for which he won so many medals I turned them into a charm bracelet. Our parents were adventurers too, and they took us on frequent trips, both overseas and in the U.S. He became worldly and sophisticated, certainly beyond his peers. Our Aunt Bee took him to the Houston Opera and us to the Alley Theater when it was really down an alley. We drove early and had the freedom to go to the major movie theaters in Houston. Pete had a dramatic flair and appreciation. Even in his younger years when I was shooting the bad guys with my double gold revolvers, he was making silent movies with his friend Tommy who had an 8 mm movie camera. I held the dialogue cards.
The house where we were raised was another influence on his appreciation of history and story. It was a large bay home built in 1900. Originally the area was called the "Golden Coast' as it was the setting for the summer homes of the prosperous early founders of Houston. When we moved there in 1945, air conditioning had made summer breezes optional. The grand Bayridge houses became permanent instead of seasonal homes for families. As children, Pete and I explored the beach and the defunct rails in the prairieland surrounding the bay. It was perfect for developing a Southern Gothic imagination.
Once our growing up years were over, we each took up our own lives. Pete found the perfect school for him, Oberlin. He became Alan, which suited him much better than his family name. We saw each other on vacations and trips but not too often. I married early and sometime later, he met Kathy in graduate school and married her. Children followed. We lived in Austin and he lived in Los Angeles. We always kept in touch, but mostly because he took family connections seriously. In our retirement years with email available, we wrote often. His letters were a treat and his memory of our history and kin was a wonderful source for me. I will surely miss him but in an odd way, I feel he will always be with me. God Bless You, dear Brother.
Noah Longley's Eulogy
My strongest memories of my uncle Pete--Pete to us Texas relatives, Alan to most other people, Walter to the government--center on childhood visits to my grandparents' house outside Houston while he was visiting there from California. The scene was often one that Pete would call ``lively,'' but that I, a bookish boy, found chaotic and nerve-wracking: dogs barking, small children squealing, the screen door banging shut as yet another herd of cousins arrived and the house filled to bursting with talk. My usual coping strategy was to sink into a chair and watch everyone else. This tended to turn into watching my uncle work the room. From the cacophony, I learned to pick out his Mid-Atlantic accent, hilariously out of place among the Texan drawls of his kin. I would watch him mill from person to person, chatting with them about their work, their travels, their children, their health, and everything else in their lives. He would be cheerful and sympathetic, humorous and charming. He caught my attention because he was always so plainly having a wonderful time. He had the air of a man at a fine banquet, passing from delight to delight.
I confess I was not used to thinking of any of us as all that delightful. Still, he didn't seem to be faking it. Rather, after watching Pete enough, I came to realize that he was putting a lot of effort into his enjoyment. He especially worked at being a good audience. Describing the first time he met Pete, my father said, ``He could become your friend in five minutes.'' He made you feel important and interesting, zeroed in on your better qualities, and overlooked your worse. He found ways to make your interests his own too, and to bring out your most stimulating thoughts. When he milled over to me, we talked about whatever I was reading, and I would briefly feel like a real, if unaccountably young, member of the literati.
As I grew up, Pete served as my occasional mentor in literature and the arts. He loved sharing the things that had captivated him. From him I learned about Edward Gorey, Randall Jarrell, and Harold Lloyd. When I went through a Goethe phase, Pete knew all the juicy historical gossip: how Goethe's first novel had started a craze for dressing like his characters, how Napoleon had slept with the book under his pillow. When I got fascinated by Edmund Spenser, he told me the story of a student who had gotten a little lost trying to plumb the allegory in /The Faerie Queen./ What I remember most from these conversations are not specific things he said about creators and works, but his way of talking about them. My teachers and schoolbooks tended to approach them solemnly, as Important Figures and Masterpieces to study. To Pete, they were first of all sources of pleasure and interest, and they were familiar rather than exalted--members of your family at a gathering, company worth the effort to know.
You learn some things by precept, others by example. My uncle didn't set out to teach me his way of relating to people or to culture; he simply lived it well enough to be a natural teacher of it. Teaching was his profession, too, of course. I hear that his classroom was as raucous as one of Grandma's family suppers, and I would guess that his lesson planning was a trifle loose. But I also hear that many of his students loved him, and it doesn't surprise me. They probably had experiences with him that were a bit like mine. Maybe they also figured out what I eventually figured out about Pete, that there was a seriousness beneath his good humor, a quiet, dogged determination to take care of his loved ones, pass on the things he cherished, and be a good man. Somehow it all came from the same place; his loves of good company, good books, beautiful things, and the people in his life all came from the same place; and with those loves came a willingness to work on their behalf.
When someone leaves us, we look for ways to keep a part of them with us. Thoughts of Uncle Pete now remind me of certain options I have. If I want, with some effort, I can see the world as lively and not just nerve-wracking; I can be a good audience for people and works; I can enjoy myself without losing my sense of purpose. Not always, but often, life can be a banquet, if I work to make it one. I am glad I got to sit beside my uncle at his for a while. He was part of mine.
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