LU CAPRA, 9/16/1937 – 6/2/2021
WASN”T IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE KNOWN AND LOVED HER?
What glory! What fun! What goodness! What lovableness….” -- Thornton Wilder
When Lu's daughter messaged me that she had died two hours previously, I just felt that one of those big Sequoias had gone down in my forest. The absence was shattering.
I met Lu in 1984, where the University of Findlay hired us both as they might need fish for the new program beginning at a medium security prison. Only Lu was not a fish: she had been teaching at the Jackson, Michigan prison for quite sometime, and when the program opened that fall, Lu became the model of how college education should go down-- even the night when in a fury of relief on both their parts, she hugged a student who was getting shock probation. She had to appear before a prison administrator who told her that women like her had two choices, to get a gun or live in fear all her life. She did neither but mentally repeated a mantra that our Chair, Rick Gebhardt gave her from the film Risky Business. You know the one.That first year, she and I made the 45 minute drive twice a week to the prison and hammered out the curriculum we'd been given. We soon gave up on the idea that the students would write a paragraph a week as the stories poured out of them in pages, not paragraphs. We put out a collection of student writing at the end of the first semester that got half our students called in to Admin for what they'd written, and we learned that writing in prison was a lot more dangerous for the men than we realized.
We did not just discuss curriculum, though. We discussed our lives, past, present, and future, and she was the first person I told that Paul and I were an item. (She almost drove her car off the road, even though Rick had told her he was guessing as much.) And she and Paul and I became a dynamic trio for TGIFs celebrations and faculty meetings. We were raucous at the week-long Fall Faculty Events that Lu began calling them "Fall Frolics," which weren't very frolicsome.
Lu talked about each of her kids and told great stories about them. One concerned the day she was to defend her doctoral dissertation-- based in the teachings of Ivan llich of "deschooling society." One of two middle kids, tussling around in the kitchen, split her head open and had to go to the ER, defense called off for the day, and Lu sighed aloud to them, "Oh why did I have five children?" Another story involved her loading them into a car, one tupperware container each for their clothes and supplies, and drove them across country to visit their grandparents in California.
Lu taught me what I needed to know to walk into prison and teach with high standards, dignity, and humor. Mostly humor. It's not even that she told jokes but that she enjoyed life so very much that we were always smiling and laughing...at life itself. We also learned a lot together about dogs: Murphy, Emma, Brenna-- retrievers for her, Scotties for me. We are both dog people. There were a lot of dogs at her 75th birthday party. Robbie was one of them.
She emailed me in February, when her memory was getting disjointed and her kids were meeting about finding a safe place for her. You will notice that the message filled with her kids and our former students from campus and prison, about others, especially her family and our former students:
Hi Friend. Just sitting here in the early morning dawn and thot I would send you a few lines. Life is full of turns and tricks and what you think will happen, hardly ever does. For instance I thot last week I would be on my way to get a hair cut and instead ended up in the hospital. I am out now and doing fine.
Seems I needed a “tune up” of a few things. As my friend, Orrin, often says, “Getting old is hell.“
Anyway, since I was awake, my mind wandered over past events as it often does, and I reread one. Of your last emails which spoke about B. [a former student released from prison after over 35 years]. How is he doing these days? It sounded from your description as if he were really doing well. Hope that has continued to be true. Please say hi for me when next you see him.
And what has been on your plate lately? As for me, I continue to bumble around as usual, still doing a lot of reading, mostly still from ,contemporary works. My family is all well and I see parts of them as often as I can.-mostly the parts with their heads on. Jand S are still loving life in Florida, and J is still working. M and C and J live in MI, And T is in Ohio. All Are well and doing their thing - whatever that may be. T keeps me updated on Becky R and Leeann K. My grandchildren seem to be thriving as well. Can’t ask for more than that!
I don’t have any new earth shatterIng news - probably because my life is pretty quiet and would seem even boring to some, but it suits me just fine. Happy late Valentine’s Day!!! And lots of love, Lu
In the intervening months, she moved into hospice, and I continued to send cards. I had just bought a card to send her of California poppies, from her birth state when I got the news of her death.
Through the years, I wrote at least two poems concerning Lu. This was the first, about one of those many trips we took to teach in prison. She, like the geese, rises above us all.
THE
GEESE AT THE PRISON
We look for them like weather or mail,
so close to the road we see
each regal neck and goose squabbles for corn.
All October their inky bodies blotted the green,
and the inmates said, being fed,
they would roost here all winter.
Four months they’ve huddled
in the blond-stubbled white field.
A few rangers made V-flights
to Blue Lick Road and back
as we’ve returned each week,
and last week, returning, witnessed, I swear,
a thousand rush up and circle the lot,
applaud the air and stop the light with wing clutter.
In the dimness they called out
their beauty and wildness
the unnatural naturalness of their ground,
and they rose, not out, but above it all.
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