A Wise and Gentle Spirit

I dreamed the other night I was sitting with John Espey on an evening as sweet as heaven, drinking a chilled white wine and talking about paper towel dispensers.

We were on the veranda of the home he and Carolyn See once occupied on a hilltop in Topanga, overlooking a ridgeline that was slowly melting into the deepening twilight. I was intense and serious, and John was relaxed and amused, but thoroughly involved in the discussion.

We had both used the same men’s room somewhere on different occasions and had noticed that the paper towel dispenser didn’t work right. When you took one paper towel it was supposed to pull the one behind it into position and it didn’t.

Digging out a second towel was a small annoyance, and I wasn’t going to do anything about it but complain. John, on the other hand, had researched the problem and had discovered how the process was supposed to work and why it didn’t.

He was about to explain it to me when the dream ended.

I’m not making this up. It was a real dream I had the night after John’s memorial service was held. I had been thinking all afternoon what I could write about him and went to sleep with that on my mind. And there it was.

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John Espey died last month at age 87 as gracefully as he had lived, without rancor or self-pity, but his death leaves me frustrated. We can’t afford to lose men of his stature.

Scholar, teacher, storyteller, world traveler and wit, he was the smartest man I ever knew, and among the gentlest. I am not erudite enough to have discussed anything with him, but he made me feel that I was, that I had something to contribute to his life, or at least to that moment.

I think that John’s egalitarian attitude was what the dream was all about. I had probably broached the subject of the paper towel dispenser, and rather than tossing it aside as the babble of a fool, he had listened and reacted.

His was the kind of intelligence that understood compassion as well as irony, and fun as well as scholarship. I heard that said many times as we sat in the cool shade of a giant pepper tree at his memorial service one sunlit afternoon.

He was a Rhodes scholar who sang to his English classes he taught for 25 years at UCLA, and composed whimsical haiku for a depressed colleague. He wrote a heavyweight tome about the poet Ezra Pound, a children’s book about Algernon the Cat and memoirs that won rave reviews.

His children remember him using chewing gum to fight an infestation of gophers because he had researched the gopher problem and that was one of the solutions. It didn’t work. He had also read that human urine would drive the rodents away.

“I’m not sure it worked,” one of his daughters said at the memorial service, half-laughing and half-crying, “but he tried it and they never came back.”

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I met John through Carolyn See, a novelist I had admired for some time and whom I am privileged to call a friend. She and John had lived together for years in a relationship that warmed the rooms they occupied.

They lived in that hilltop home I was talking about, but moved out of Topanga not too long ago, leaving a hole in a community that embraced them both. Carolyn’s daughter Lisa, who became John’s daughter too, is also a celebrated author, making them a unique and gifted family of writers.

The memorial service was held at Lisa’s house. John’s two daughters from an earlier marriage spoke and so did Carolyn’s two daughters, one of whom, Clara, composed a list of things she hadn’t known until John Espey entered her life.

“I didn’t know how to watch birds,” she wrote. “I didn’t know how to feel safe. I didn’t know how gentle a man could be. I didn’t know the importance of style or finesse. I didn’t know how much you could love someone you weren’t related to.”

“He made everyone feel they were special in his life,” Carolyn See said later. “His last concern was for his students. He said he had given his all but didn’t think he had done enough.”

That was John Espey, the charity of his final thoughts directed at others; a glowing last light in the darkness that finally engulfed him. We radiate attitudes to those who surround us, and what he radiated was a generosity of spirit that burned to the end of his life.

Ultimately, we are judged by those we love and who love us. There were many who loved John Espey and who relied on both his warmth and wisdom to fulfill themselves. Who else of his standing would have bothered to ponder over paper towel dispensers with a college dropout, and who will do so now?

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com