The second installment of my adventures with Howdy Boy, aka Troy Anderson (Stanford ’89/’90). In the first installment (my 3/8 posting “Howdy”), with the folksy-friendly salutation “Howdy”, he introduced himself as a student in my gigantic 1989 syntax course — and thanked me for not flunking him. Now, I have a passionate interest (both personal and scholarly) in people’s lives — their daily lives and their life histories — so when I learned that Troy was not only a Stanford football player (a huge guy who looks like the offensive tackle he was at Stanford) but also a high-ranking Go player, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis in linguistics, well, I was totally intrigued. We embarked on learning about each other.
Meanwhile, there was the almost flunking out. I wrote him:
It [has] occurred to me that if there was any chance of your flunking out, it would have been because you were juggling too many balls at once, always a danger for very smart manic multi-taskers, as you obviously were at the time (and probably still are).
(I’ll return to the barely not flunking out below). And I added:
I haven’t been able to piece together your history in recent years, so if you could fill me in some, I’d like to hear about it. I might try to talk you into letting me write about you on my blog. (You can sample my blog at www.arnoldzwicky.org.)
Troy turned out to be extraordinarily open in his response — giving me an inventory of major life events, some quite personal in nature, offering to supply further details, and inviting me to post whatever I wanted. An attitude that resonates with the way he presents himself; as I wrote to him a little while later:
you’re a sunny person; your most natural facial expression is a smile of pleasure... I take that disposition to be a sign of a way of being, a moral quality — of openness, of empathy, of enthusiastic commitment. In any case, whether you know it or not, you project a kind of niceness (despite your imposing body) that has surely served you well in life
Clearly, I appreciated his brand of charm, despite his being so startlingly unlike me (except for sharing linguistics, that sunny presentation of self, and serious moral commitments).
But then, more or less in the middle of the inventory, came a swerve and a surprise.
(more…)
