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IVAN EDWIN LESTER

A Tribute given by Barbara Knott

March 17, 2007

You may recall stories of synchronicity between death and the weather. It occurs especially with a great person’s passing. Ivan Lester was not a culture hero like Julius Caesar or Jesus Christ, but he was an extraordinary man. And it seemed on Thursday and Friday of this week that the heavens were reacting appropriately to his death. The weather was deeply overcast and then rainy, then windy and cold. This was Ivan Lester wintry weather, which he preferred of all kinds, and it lightened my heavy heart to see it so.

I think everyone here who knew Ivan or who met him once or who simply heard about him will have known that he was a gentleman--a gentle man--pleasant in his conversation, modest, quiet, soft-spoken. Like all deeply introverted people, he did not carry much of himself on the surface, was not easy to read or to fathom. But I, who loved him long and well, also knew many dimensions of his personality and character, and today, as his body awaits the fire that will burn away what we call his remains, while we are in a position to go with him some little distance on his journey, I would like to tell some of the things I know. I intend not to breach his love of privacy in doing so, and I think he would be pleased to hear me speak out loud my appreciation of him.

First: we chose to have an informal gathering of family and friends rather than a church service, not because Ivan was unreligious but because he believed in and revered many gods–Greek and Roman and Hebrew and Hindu–and particularly the goddesses, for he had a warm and lively affection for women and so naturally, stories of divine women captured his imagination. The Christian image he liked best to have around him was Mary, and he took delight in touching up the paint on the statue given him by his own mother, Manta, and then mounting the statue on a wall shelf just inside the front door of our house so that anyone who entered would pass by her. The house is full of the gods, with framed prints of Aphrodite and Flora, Hermes and Pan, statues of Krishna and Shiva, a painting that Ivan made of Hecate, the moon goddess, a carving he made on a walking stick of the face of Hermes. Outdoors, there is a statue of Pan brooding over the fish pond across from another figure, Hebe, the Greek cupbearer to the gods. Dionysos in the form of a divine baby holding grapes lies on a table nearby, and behind him, affixed to the fence, is a wall relief of the Three Graces. This was also given to us by Manta, who found it in Paris. Manta has a way of listening out for clues about what one might like in a gift, and we have loved many things she selected for us.

Across the yard, inside a small shelter, is a statue of Krishna playing a flute that Ravi Kumar gave us. In the middle of the back yard, in front of a small grove of bamboo, is a Buddha seated on a table. Once, on my birthday, Ivan gave me lifesize statues of Hebe and Artemis. These we placed on the grounds of my family home at Palmetto: Artemis in the woods and Hebe beside the big pond. So you see, our life has been orchestrated by what we know of the Immortals.

It will come as no surprise to you that Ivan was a great reader. In that we were alike, and we spent hundreds of evenings together over a period of l5 years, sitting at right angles to each other with our feet touching on the bench between us. We read stories of gods and humans and all the creatures of the world. Our reading tastes were different, for I preferred fiction, while he read history and politics. I once asked him to tilt his book up so I could see what he was reading.” World War II?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “It helps me relax.” He even read books on math. I think he’d satisfied his interests in reading philosophy while he was in graduate school at the University of Georgia and then in the doctoral program at Minnesota. As most of you know, he wound up (as a philosophy major) working at the Atlanta/Fulton County Public Library, where he found a wonderful community of friends, many of whom worked for a time in a department called Information Line. You may not know that in between graduate school and the Library, he worked as a cook in a Ford factory and was fiercely proud of it. He thought it rounded out his education.

Our interests in reading overlapped in some places. One was Greek drama. The plays of Aeschylus he read many times and eventually bought filmed versions of them and watched them over and over, along with films about Queen Elizabeth I whom he loved, as he loved all about the Renaissance. His musical taste was very focused on court music of that period. And Shakespeare. Our love of Shakespeare was equally intense. He knew much of Romeo and Juliet by heart and could and did quote long passages of Hamlet. Then we discovered the historical novels of Patrick O’Brian and he and Jonathan and I read all 20 novels several times. We lived with sea captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s surgeon Steven Maturin as if they were family.

So he was an intellectual, as his cousin Sherry Adams would say, but his interest and activities ranged far and wide as well as deep. I’ve mentioned that he liked to paint and carve. He never saw himself as an artist, but rather as a person making art, as he thought any person might. He made many things. During the three weeks before he died, he was busy in the evenings on several projects. One was to restore a Madonna and Child statue for the Palmetto place. From there he brought back a broken gargoyle to repair and had it out on a shelf ready to work on when he fell. Not long ago he finished a clothes basket that he made out of odds and ends around the house. He liked to look at things and think of what he could do with them and then do it. He made many wonderful things with his hands.

When I first met him and ventured into his back yard that became my back yard, too, it was planted in clumps of sage and wormwood. He was like my father in that he liked to have a garden just to see things grow. Also like my father, he was not averse to having a worn out appliance lying around the back yard as if it were lawn furniture. I had to work up my nerve to say after several weeks, “Couldn’t we move this around front for the truck to pick up?” “What?” he said. “A fine old range like that? What if we need it? We could put something on it. A flower pot, maybe.” Of course, he was getting my goat and would finally say, “Yes, m’am,” and let it go. He let go of a large number of cats when I moved in, after he figured to himself and said out loud that I was worth at least a dozen cats.

Something that you probably don’t know much about, unless you have heard me speak of it, is that he knew how to love. The thing I have found myself thinking and saying more than anything else lately is that Ivan practiced unconditional love, and I felt it, and I can tell you that is a rare and wonderful thing.

His love was also earthy and expressive. Here is a sample, a line that came to him and that he gave me in a letter: I do like to lie lots and long, lolling with my lady in the lotus mud like contented alligators.

Another poem he wrote to me contained a simple image of his hand resting on my hip, but there beside the image was a message written out in Egyptian hieroglyphics about my coming to meet him.

And he wrote letters, sometimes sitting in the next room from me.

Darling Barbara,

...I could not have loved as I love you when I was young. I would not have known how, nor what love really is, back then when I was callow and stupid.... I would not exchange the years we’ve been together for anything, not to be twenty again with my whole life before me.

Here’s the beginning of another letter:

Sweet Little Sleepy Rabbit,

I love what you did to the livingroom and our room. I really love it, and now, having got the tape off your wall and finished my work for the day and eaten a sandwich though not in that order I am writing a letter to you while you’re napping, though I’d rather come in there with you....

and this...

Darling,

Ching is in the doggie room and Chang is in the living room. I sorted the books. We’ll pack them up tonight. I love you, Ivan.

Chang and Ching are the Pekingese pups that eventually came to live in our house, and though Ivan had always seen himself as a cat man, he was moved to great affection for the dogs, so different from each other and so complementary to our lives. Now our little family is no more--not how it was when Ching greeted Ivan by dancing on his hind legs and sitting back on his haunches like a circus dog, a trick that always got rewarded with a treat. And when Chang, whose history brought him to us as a dog wary of men, learned to love Ivan because of little rituals Ivan devised that brought Chang closer and closer until he was eating out of Ivan’s hand.

I don’t know yet how the dogs will adjust to Ivan’s death. I know that part of our humanity, though, is to mourn our losses. I have tried to recall for all of us some lines that offer comforts. There is not much comfort in these lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but it is an appropriate thought to begin with:

From Hamlet, these lines speak to us:

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.

I believe that Ivan lived in a state of readiness to die. I never saw him embarrassed or ashamed of anything I can recall, and that, I think, is a sign that he was living his life authentically.

I have not mentioned his generosity, which was spontaneous and full and without any attached strings. My son Jonathan experienced Ivan’s generosity. Yesterday Jonathan and I sat on the couch together, and he said something about Ivan’s decency, then he added that many people are decent, but Ivan was thoroughly decent. I don’t think I’ve heard that said of anyone before.

Today I want to thank you all for coming here to honor Ivan, either because you knew him or because you came to comfort and support Manta and me. I want to pay homage to Manta and Ivan’s father, Ivan the Elder, who preceded his son by a few years across the threshold of death, for having given birth to Ivan the Younger and for raising their only child and supporting him through the difficulties and uncertainties of his youth and for loving him and for welcoming me into their lives. Ivan had deep regard for his father, and when he spoke on the phone to his mother, he often took his leave saying, “I love you, Mom.” He had many warm memories of making trips with his parents when he was young. He shared his father’s love of trains and guns and walking canes. He took delight in his mother’s sense of humor and her way of dramatizing stories. He also loved his Aunt Alice and his Uncle Charles and his Aunt Jane, and he was nourished by the large and affectionate community of his cousins.

I began with the gods. Now, in closing, I pray that they will be with Ivan in death as they were in life, and that he will be well received into the realm of the Immortals.

Here is something that Ivan copied down for me once:

Words are gifts to persuade even gods. And stronger than gold are the myriad words of mortals.

It’s Greek, I’m pretty sure, but I no longer recall where it came from. I do know that these lines are again from Hamlet, given by Horatio at Hamlet’s death: