By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Halloween is upon us—a time noted in the ancient Celtic calendar as the day when we mark the passing of summer into a new year by drinking beer with our neighbors in the driveway while giving out candy to teenagers holding pillowcases. It’s also a day when the line between the living and the dead is blurred, and spirits reach out from beyond the grave to screw us over.
Just like my friend Chris Kilmartin.
Chris was a retired Mary Washington College professor and friend of mine for nearly 40 years who passed away unexpectedly a few months ago. I encounter many reminders of Chris and our friendship as I go on living my day-to-day existence. This is the world we all inhabit as we try to cope with loss and sorrow.
Memories of Chris emerge from unlikely moments and places, such as a hotel room in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, or Michael McDonald singing backup on just about every Steely Dan you’ve ever heard. Chris loved Steely Dan, but hated Michael McDonald. As for Pawtucket, I recently found myself looking over the skyline there one night and seeing a pop-up carnival along the banks of the Seekonk River. It featured a Pirate Ship ride that I could just make out from my hotel window. The ride was lit up and, from my vantage point, the lights seemed to be moving as they blinked in quick succession up the arms of a capital A—an optical illusion known as the phi phenomenon in which the human brain perceives movement between stationary, alternating, visual stimuli.
I learned about the phi phenomenon (and its connection to Gestalt Psychology) during two semesters of Psychology I had to take with Dr. Kilmartin back in the day at MWC. I often joked that it was the only thing I learned.
One of Chris’ many talents, in the classroom and beyond, was to be entertaining and to make people laugh. He also loved being on stage, so in his off hours he frequently performed as a standup comedian or musician. Chris was known by booking agents as someone willing to drive anywhere, within a two-hour radius, to open for the opener of the opening act of the main performer so long as his gin and tonics were on the house.
I saw Chris’s comedy act on many occasions and can still recite some of his best jokes, though they could at time be a little obscure, such as my all-time favorite: “The only time you should say ‘Jesus is the Answer’ is if it’s a clue on Jeopardy! and the correct response is, ‘Who is youngest of baseball’s Alou brothers?’”
Chris and I were texting the day before he passed away. He was in the middle of reading my new book Funny for Nothing, and helpfully offering book jacket blurbs for a second collection of humor columns, one of which was, “Drew Gallagher is the new Dave Barry, only much more clever and much less wealthy.”
I loved him like a brother…until he reached out from beyond the grave to bump me from a promotional opportunity.
My publisher had impressed on me that any publicity for Funny for Nothing was welcome, and I should make every effort to get my book into the hands of a worldwide audience desperately in need of humor and a reason to live (I’m paraphrasing). With that in mind, I contacted the Mary Washington College alumni magazine to alert them about a book publication by one of their most decorated English majors, assuming they would not bother to check if my academic career would qualify as “decorated.”
I relished the thought of former dorm mates and grown men with whom I once shared a bathroom telling their friends and families that they’d known me back when we used the same washer and dryer, and that they once wrote on the whiteboard on my dorm room door, “Call Your Parents…Again.”
Alumni book sales would be robust, but most importantly, people I had not seen in nearly 35 years would get to regale the world with stories of their dorm-years brush with greatness.
Until Chris intervened.
A few weeks after I sent notice of my book to the alumni magazine—and they agreed to feature it in the publication—I got a very sweet email from the editor apologizing because, due to an unfortunate event, they no longer had space for notice of my book and I would have wait to another six months until the next biannual issue.
That unfortunate event was the passing of a beloved professor, Dr. Chris Kilmartin. I had to laugh. And then, of course, cry.
What he’d done, from beyond the grave, was bump notice of my first book from the alumni magazine. None of the people who knew and loved Chris would have ever wanted him dead. He was a bright light in an ever-darkening world. But if he could have known he would steal the limelight from me by dying, he would have gotten a kick out of the irony.
So this Halloween season, remember that there are tricks and then there are treats. My friend Chris played one last trick on me, and man was it ever a bittersweet treat.
