Where Are They Now? Brian W. Ford, English Faculty, 1981–88

 

The two things I loved best about my time at Groton were teaching with my wife's office a few steps away from my classroom and seeing my older son, Win, around campus—in the Chapel, in the Schoolroom, on the basketball court, on the river—during his Second and Third Form years (after which we left, Burch and my boys for Milton, I for Noble and Greenough). For me, a family closeness some might have found claustrophobic felt right. Perhaps having lived in Senegal for two years in the Peace Corps had given me a taste for an older way of living.

 

I loved the Chapel, including the Groton School hymn. The last time I sang it I couldn't finish for the tears choking me. The Chapel and the hymn and much else about the school's traditions, its sense of a fine history, its belief in a purpose beyond the self, seemed to me, however imperfectly realized from day to day (like the Supreme Being in Time Bandits, I'm not entirely dim) to give the noble pursuit of teaching some extra glory, like a whiff from a lilac bush on a spring run on Old Ayer Road.

 

And of course I loved my students. I came to Groton after eight years at another school; it was at Groton that I fully realized that the expression in loco parentis at times took on a literal power. I keep the yearbooks, from my forty-two years of teaching, in the basement of my house in Vermont; between sets with my old Sears set of weights, I still (I did this morning) take one out and leaf through it as I catch my wind, remembering names and faces that had receded into the misty past (this morning, Jamie Nichols and Peter Cawley, Form of 1984).

 

The single most important element of my Groton years was talking about writing with Todd Jesdale. Together, we worked out an approach that I know still to be eccentric and radical—and right. That I also learned by watching him coach rowing— enough to develop championship crews as head coach at two other schools—is no coincidence; he was the finest teacher I ever worked with (and coaching is, of course, teaching).

 

I am a widower now, having lost my beloved wife of fifty years, Mary Burch Tracy Ford, to Alzheimer's some five years ago and to death on October 2, 2019. I believe I've always had a loner's social distancing tendency, and my apartment in West Concord, Massachusetts, is a quiet place. 

 

I gave away many, many books when Burch first went into a memory care unit at a local assisted living complex, but new ones come in almost as fast as the old went out. There's a great deal of good writing going on in our world (most recently, for me, Richard Powers's Overstory and Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel). And I re-read, always, Dickens and Austen and Eliot (George). Glory be to God.