My Father

My Father___________________________ Ruth R. Miller Even ifhe were not my father, just knowing Jim Wayne Miller would have had the most profound impact on my life. But he was my father, which makes me the luckiest and most unfortunate person in this room. Having him as a father gave us children such an unreasonable example to live up to. Having such an extraordinary light beaming in your own home can have the effect ofblinding you, leavingyou dumb struck, frozen in awe, and with the knowledge that nothing you do can catapult you to his level of greatness. This greatness in his academic work, his artistic expression, his largerthan life persona, cast an immense shadowfrom which I sometimes wished to escape. In choosing a master's thesis topic, I tried to elude his area ofexpertise. By studying African American popular culture, I thought I could escape his genius. The more I worked on my topic and developed the things I wanted to say, the more I realized that my father had expressed these very opinions in his work on Southern culture. None of my ideas, it turned out, were original. They had all come, as ifby osmosis, from him. One night while reading a book on performance theory, I came upon a chapter wherein the author repeatedly quoted someone named Miller. I looked up the footnote to see who this Millerperson was and sure enough, it was my father. What was he doing in this book on my subject?! Who would have guessed that Dad, longtime defender of the southern rural poor, was also an expert on a performative inner-city subculture. Much is made ofmy father's kindness and his unusual generosity, particularly with students and aspiring writers. But of equal note was his wicked sense ofhumorandhis cantankerous argumentation. He was someone with whom it was entertaining and enlightening to disagree, and ultimately he was refreshingly open to seeing things in new ways. It was an argument with my father that inspired the idea for my thesis work. "I'm going to prove you wrong," I said. "I hope you do," he replied. Nothing less could have inspired me to carry out the exhaustive research that followed . I cherish our playful verbal duels which I now suspect were part of a carefully devised plot to motivate my sluggish academic investigation. Ruth Miller has two brothers, Jim and Fred, musician and artist. She completedgraduate work in May 1997 and is currently teaching at a college in Oakland, California. Shegave this tribute at herfather's funeral. 6 I now see my father's brilliance not as a shadowlooming over me but as a mountain I attempt to scale every day. Though I know that I can never reach the summit, this mountain provides an endless, steady stream of inspiration. I have learned many things from my father. But the most significant thing he taught me was that one should do what one loves to do. Ifone loves what one does, work doesn't seem like work, pressure doesn't seem like pressure, being busy is a pleasure. Dad loved what he did—primarily writing and teaching. I grew up around professors, have attended four different universities in the past ten years, and have never known another professor who loved to teach as much as my father. He worked with the purest of motives—he was not interested in faculty politics or academic grandstanding, he declined other university opportunities of monetary advancementwhich would have taken him out ofthe classroom. He simply loved to share knowledge. Workingin a field with the unfortunate and ironic occupational hazards of egotism and petty politics, Dad's generosity and modesty served as a reminder ofthe best qualities which lie (sometimes dormant) in all ofus. Now suffering the aching gnaw ofhis absence, we must honor his memory and each other bypulling those qualities out ofourselves andputting them back into the world. In recentweeks, I had asked Dad to practice visualization techniques to help him heal. He said that he had been doing something similar—he visualized himselfin his classroom, going fishing, writing in his office—in other words, doing the things he loved to do. For Dad, life was...