![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kukla_tkoSo, I have given a hint about my father. Several, in fact.
He used to teach at SLUH, and retired this year. As was customary for teachers who were leaving, a student wrote an essay about Papa.
I am posting it here, under a cut.
I have to edit, as I don't want to post names. I have to remove a whole snippet about the meaning of his first name. I do feel obliged to include the name of the writer. So, for editing purposes, let's pretend that my father's (and therefore my) last name is... Denisinsky. (I am already leaving great big clues as to who Papa and I are. A good sleuth can work it out. Let's just pretend that I am still annonymous, shall we?)
My name is Erik Buchholz, and I am a Senior. I would like to start by giving a list of things Mr. Denisinsky cannot do:......(10 seconds of silence)........... Having given you this comprehensive list, I would now like to say the things Mr. Denisinsky can do: Over the course of 29 years, he has taught Advanced Geometry, hiked and canoed, led the Auto Club, headed the chess team, taught Russian, wrestled for 6 years, pole-vaulted, learned yoga and tai chi, become a general licensed contractor, taken 4 years of
Chinese, and repaired computers. Mr. Denisinsky is what I call a collector of knowledge. He finds something interesting and puts those new tidbits in his bag.
When I came here during Freshman year, Mr. Denisinsky sat at the back of our Chinese class. For over a month, he never said much. We just thought of him as "that man with the salt and pepper beard." Eventually, Dr. ChineseTeacher had to
leave for a conference, and he took over the class. He started off by saying that, ever since he had been a student at SLUH, he had always been interested in Chinese. But, in those days, it was an after-school class, and he didn't have time for it. I once asked him why he wanted to take Chinese.
He responded, "I have the utmost respect for Dr. ChineseTeacher. Some of the ideas in Chinese coincide with those of tai chi. Dr. ChineseTeacher asked me many times to go on the trip to China. I told her that I couldn't read the street signs. She said that I didn't need to be able to read the signs. So, I told her that I
WANTED to be able to read the signs." I dare anyone to find a man who seeks knowledge more than Mr. Denisinsky.
I suspect the real reason he took Chinese was because the Chinese have "four character phrases," phrases that are akin to the sayings of Ben Franklin, but a bit different. The sayings reflect cultural stories and sage advice. If you've ever talked to Mr. Denisinsky, you know that he speaks a little, pauses, speaks a little more, then pauses again. Some people are bewildered at this habit and lack the patience to wait. A while back, he lent me a book on the origin of words. He seems fascinated by the reasons we
say the things we do. I believe that he thinks, in the words of (Another Teacher), "Words are coins. Spend them carefully." He chooses his words carefully because he knows each word has a certain meaning. Why say something that you don't mean?
Now, there are many rumors surrounding Mr. Denisinsky. One was put to me this way: Picture the middle of algebra class. Suddenly, a ceiling tile pops off, falling to the floor. A pair of legs dangle from the ceiling, and down jumps Mr. Denisinsky. Then, he just walks out like it was nothing special.
Another was that Mr. Denisinsky can walk through walls. I assure you that both of these rumors are only partially true. According to Mr. Denisinsky, he has only jumped down in teachers' offices. They are, of course, startled for a moment. Then, they say, "Oh, it's just Mr. Denisinsky..." and get back to work. As for walking through walls, well, I don't put that past him. It's only a rumor because I haven't seen him materialize in front of me.
You may be wondering just what Mr. Denisinsky is doing in the ceiling. The simple answer is: He's fixing stuff. You may wonder just what kind of stuff. To answer that, first let me say one thing: Mr. Denisinsky can fix anything. Teachers actually call him to fix things at their homes, repair roofs, and so forth. He's like MacGuiver with a beard. He has the skills of an electrician, computer master, plumbing engineer, anything imaginable. If any
pipe breaks, wire snaps, or Ethernet cord gets unplugged, Mr. Denisinsky willbe there, crawling around in the ventilation shafts.
I talked to many teachers, and the common response was that he is "the most brilliant man they have ever met." He has helped me with geometry, physics, and calculus. (Another SLUH Teacher) once took a math class with Mr. Denisinsky. They were asked a question about three men stranded on an island. Somehow they kept dividing the fish up. Anyway, the question was about how many fish
they had to begin with. Mr. Denisinsky raised his hand and said, "Negative two!" He was dead serious. When (Random Teacher) explained this story to me, his face lit up as he said, "And that's the thing. Negative two is a perfectly legitimate answer! Granted, you can't have negative two fish, but it works!"
I was curious as to what kind of a teacher Mr. Denisinsky was, so I asked some of his disciples. (Random Teacher 2) answered that he was "a hard taskmaster. He wouldn't just give you a straight answer. He expected you to think about it and figure it out on your own." (Random Teacher) described him as "Weird. He had a common quote: 'Look at what you've got, and play with what you've got.' He
wanted us to look at proofs, play with them in our minds, and try to see them differently. Some of us just couldn't see it."
So far, I've just painted him as an academic person, and that's not entirely true. (Random Female Teacher) said, "His intelligence pales to his generous, patient heart." There was a time when he actually gave up his lunch period to explain geometry to me. He was always willing to help me. (Different Random Teacher) relayed a story about how his car broke down. This was before he knew Mr.
Denisinsky. That man pulled over and fixed (Different Random Teacher)'s car, a perfect stranger's car. He didn't demand anything, simply driving off to help the next person.
Other students lovingly refer to him as Coach D. Although he can clear nine feet in pole-vaulting, most remember him for wrestling. Students thought of him as (Wrestling Coach)s test dummy. He would use Mr. Denisinsky to demonstrate certain poses, mangling Mr. Denisinsky, twisting him this way and that. Oddly, Mr. Denisinsky didn't seem to mind. It was just another method of
teaching.
Many don't know that he loves to read Shakespeare and watch the musical Guys and Dolls. In fact, at Wisconsin State University, he acted in the play The Fantastics. Some of you may have read the article in the Post Dispatch about the Denisinsky family sewing. Every so often, relatives meet and just sew. But his house was not always a meeting place. Before he (Edit: RE)married, it was "bereft of furniture. The living room [was] filled with metal shelves all in
a row, holding journals stored in containers made from empty snack cracker boxes. Another room held only saws."
Despite his fascination with machinery, he was still a naturalist. He knew the area in Blaire Creek very well. He would often explore caves and get lost. He sometimes brought the dog (Dog's Name) with him on these caving expeditions. He canoed, and anyone who saw him fancied him a mountain man. He had some appreciation for aesthetics. (Art Teacher) once described a
passage that Mr. Denisinsky brought to her about the Russian artist,
Kandinsky. The artist had expressed the thrill of squeezing paint out of a tube for the first time in such an artful way that Mr. Denisinsky couldn't resist sharing it with someone. Two years later, (Art Teacher) wanted to tell her class that very passage. When she asked Mr. Denisinsky, he rubbed his beard for a second, then said, "Try page 28." She opened the book and, sure
enough, there it was.
If you've ever seen Mr. Denisinsky's desk, you know it is in complete disarray. Yet, ask the man to locate something, and he finds it within a few seconds. He has the ability to sort chaos. (Random Teacher) once took me to the room across from the math office. He unlocked the door and pointed to hundreds of Ethernet cables snaking around the office. He said, "There! That IS Mr. Denisinsky!" That man could, through such random chaos of wires,
somehow know what everything did and where everything went. He must love the complexity of computers and wires, the ability to pull the guts out and somehow reform them into something manageable.
(Edit: removed section regarding Papa's First Name.)
I believe that a school without a Denisinsky isn't really a school. There is something about Mr. Denisinsky that is irreplaceable. There is just something...Denisinskyian. You have to invent new words to describe him. (Additional Teacher) said, "Words just aren't interesting enough to describe Mr. Denisinsky anymore." There is just something in language that fails to capture the
essence of that man. I asked him what he plans to do after leaving. He said, "Well, I'll see when I leave." When I think of Mr. Denisinsky, I picture a wandering scholar. He wanders the halls of SLUH, wanders around the ceiling, and now he's wandering off to a new place. As a SLUH community, we thank him for his generous service, and we wish him the best of luck in those
wandering places.
_____________________
Of course, my father made a brilliant teacher, and touched the lives of thousands of students at SLUH.
But you will find no mention whatsoever of any of his children, only a vague reference to his (new) wife, and his dog. I would like to point out that his SON (who had the same name as his dog) went with him camping and into those caves a heck of a lot more often than the dog of the same name did. I would also like to point out that his OTHER son attended SLUH and probably knew the Erik in question.
This student loves my father, and thinks he is magical and saintly. But, go back 15 years, and ask one of those students to write about him, and the words that will appear frequently are "Abject fear" and "Strong sullen type" and "Ghostly."
I am pleased that my father has turned his life around and is getting the adoration he has clearly always wanted and never felt that he received. He is, after all, and adult child of alcoholic parents, and has 9 siblings. And he was the bright one who slipped through the cracks.
But I suspect that I will always resent the thousands of SLUH students who got the father I never had. The hundreds of students who he stayed after school to teach and understood, while I was struggling to understand him, or get positive attention from him in the brief hours that he was home. I will resent the students to whom he told his stories, when I only got information about my father and his life through my mother's stories. (Some of which were definitely colored by her opinion.)
Fortunately for me, my father is still alive, and I do spend time with him. Fortunately for me, I am brave enough to reach across the divide and try to make sense of him.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks knows my father, somewhat independent from his friendship with me. Knows him from that awful period during which I was going through adolescence, actually. And stated that he could never cohabit with Papa because he Papa scares the hell out of him, because Papa is too angry all the time.
That felt... validating. Because Papa ISN'T angry all the time... NOW.
But he was. And I wasn't the only one who noticed. Those of you who know me, know that when pushed too far, and the seething rage comes to the forefront... I can be so scary that I can clear a room with a glance. There's a gesture that I can make which will make certain people shrink in terror and fear. I can open a corridor in a crowd of strangers with my very presence when I get like that.
And I don't get that power from my mother.
We were very rarely spanked or struck while I was growing up. No, no. Papa never had to threaten us with a belt or even his hand. I am certain that my brothers and I believed that if we ever pushed him far enough that he had to administer physical punishment... we would not survive. We lived in fear of this man for years.
When I was in High school, and just after I graduated (while I was SMOKIN' HOT) I loved to go to SLUH and flirt with the guys who went to school there. I would get to the point where they were starting to push up on me, when I would casually drop into the conversation that my father taught at SLUH.
"Really? What's his name?"
"Denisinsky. I'm Kukla Denisinsky."
The poor boy(s) would reel in terror. Really. Reel. In. Terror.
"HE's your DAD?!? OMGOMG I'm sorry. Don't tell him I bothered you!"
Heh. Ok, I kind of got off on the power trip. And I never dated anyone from SLUH.
Nowadays when I offer the information to a SLUH student that I am Mr. Denisinsky's daughter, I get an equally explosive reaction.
"He's your DAD? OMGOMG, I love that guy! He's our resident genius! There was this one time when he helped me (Blah blah.)"
Go figure.
Of course, it wasn't until after the divorce that this dramatic transformation occurred. So, I am left to assume that Papa was like that because Mom (and to a lesser degree, we, the children)...
...Made him that way.
It wasn't until he went to live by himself (Surrounded by his tools and books) and got a used dog that he became Mr. Denisinsky, Zen Master.
Yeah. Great. As if my self esteem didn't need that additional kick in the crotch.
Enough for now. And now you all see why posting that story about my offering him money as a tiny child hurt so much to post. Sigh.
He used to teach at SLUH, and retired this year. As was customary for teachers who were leaving, a student wrote an essay about Papa.
I am posting it here, under a cut.
I have to edit, as I don't want to post names. I have to remove a whole snippet about the meaning of his first name. I do feel obliged to include the name of the writer. So, for editing purposes, let's pretend that my father's (and therefore my) last name is... Denisinsky. (I am already leaving great big clues as to who Papa and I are. A good sleuth can work it out. Let's just pretend that I am still annonymous, shall we?)
My name is Erik Buchholz, and I am a Senior. I would like to start by giving a list of things Mr. Denisinsky cannot do:......(10 seconds of silence)........... Having given you this comprehensive list, I would now like to say the things Mr. Denisinsky can do: Over the course of 29 years, he has taught Advanced Geometry, hiked and canoed, led the Auto Club, headed the chess team, taught Russian, wrestled for 6 years, pole-vaulted, learned yoga and tai chi, become a general licensed contractor, taken 4 years of
Chinese, and repaired computers. Mr. Denisinsky is what I call a collector of knowledge. He finds something interesting and puts those new tidbits in his bag.
When I came here during Freshman year, Mr. Denisinsky sat at the back of our Chinese class. For over a month, he never said much. We just thought of him as "that man with the salt and pepper beard." Eventually, Dr. ChineseTeacher had to
leave for a conference, and he took over the class. He started off by saying that, ever since he had been a student at SLUH, he had always been interested in Chinese. But, in those days, it was an after-school class, and he didn't have time for it. I once asked him why he wanted to take Chinese.
He responded, "I have the utmost respect for Dr. ChineseTeacher. Some of the ideas in Chinese coincide with those of tai chi. Dr. ChineseTeacher asked me many times to go on the trip to China. I told her that I couldn't read the street signs. She said that I didn't need to be able to read the signs. So, I told her that I
WANTED to be able to read the signs." I dare anyone to find a man who seeks knowledge more than Mr. Denisinsky.
I suspect the real reason he took Chinese was because the Chinese have "four character phrases," phrases that are akin to the sayings of Ben Franklin, but a bit different. The sayings reflect cultural stories and sage advice. If you've ever talked to Mr. Denisinsky, you know that he speaks a little, pauses, speaks a little more, then pauses again. Some people are bewildered at this habit and lack the patience to wait. A while back, he lent me a book on the origin of words. He seems fascinated by the reasons we
say the things we do. I believe that he thinks, in the words of (Another Teacher), "Words are coins. Spend them carefully." He chooses his words carefully because he knows each word has a certain meaning. Why say something that you don't mean?
Now, there are many rumors surrounding Mr. Denisinsky. One was put to me this way: Picture the middle of algebra class. Suddenly, a ceiling tile pops off, falling to the floor. A pair of legs dangle from the ceiling, and down jumps Mr. Denisinsky. Then, he just walks out like it was nothing special.
Another was that Mr. Denisinsky can walk through walls. I assure you that both of these rumors are only partially true. According to Mr. Denisinsky, he has only jumped down in teachers' offices. They are, of course, startled for a moment. Then, they say, "Oh, it's just Mr. Denisinsky..." and get back to work. As for walking through walls, well, I don't put that past him. It's only a rumor because I haven't seen him materialize in front of me.
You may be wondering just what Mr. Denisinsky is doing in the ceiling. The simple answer is: He's fixing stuff. You may wonder just what kind of stuff. To answer that, first let me say one thing: Mr. Denisinsky can fix anything. Teachers actually call him to fix things at their homes, repair roofs, and so forth. He's like MacGuiver with a beard. He has the skills of an electrician, computer master, plumbing engineer, anything imaginable. If any
pipe breaks, wire snaps, or Ethernet cord gets unplugged, Mr. Denisinsky willbe there, crawling around in the ventilation shafts.
I talked to many teachers, and the common response was that he is "the most brilliant man they have ever met." He has helped me with geometry, physics, and calculus. (Another SLUH Teacher) once took a math class with Mr. Denisinsky. They were asked a question about three men stranded on an island. Somehow they kept dividing the fish up. Anyway, the question was about how many fish
they had to begin with. Mr. Denisinsky raised his hand and said, "Negative two!" He was dead serious. When (Random Teacher) explained this story to me, his face lit up as he said, "And that's the thing. Negative two is a perfectly legitimate answer! Granted, you can't have negative two fish, but it works!"
I was curious as to what kind of a teacher Mr. Denisinsky was, so I asked some of his disciples. (Random Teacher 2) answered that he was "a hard taskmaster. He wouldn't just give you a straight answer. He expected you to think about it and figure it out on your own." (Random Teacher) described him as "Weird. He had a common quote: 'Look at what you've got, and play with what you've got.' He
wanted us to look at proofs, play with them in our minds, and try to see them differently. Some of us just couldn't see it."
So far, I've just painted him as an academic person, and that's not entirely true. (Random Female Teacher) said, "His intelligence pales to his generous, patient heart." There was a time when he actually gave up his lunch period to explain geometry to me. He was always willing to help me. (Different Random Teacher) relayed a story about how his car broke down. This was before he knew Mr.
Denisinsky. That man pulled over and fixed (Different Random Teacher)'s car, a perfect stranger's car. He didn't demand anything, simply driving off to help the next person.
Other students lovingly refer to him as Coach D. Although he can clear nine feet in pole-vaulting, most remember him for wrestling. Students thought of him as (Wrestling Coach)s test dummy. He would use Mr. Denisinsky to demonstrate certain poses, mangling Mr. Denisinsky, twisting him this way and that. Oddly, Mr. Denisinsky didn't seem to mind. It was just another method of
teaching.
Many don't know that he loves to read Shakespeare and watch the musical Guys and Dolls. In fact, at Wisconsin State University, he acted in the play The Fantastics. Some of you may have read the article in the Post Dispatch about the Denisinsky family sewing. Every so often, relatives meet and just sew. But his house was not always a meeting place. Before he (Edit: RE)married, it was "bereft of furniture. The living room [was] filled with metal shelves all in
a row, holding journals stored in containers made from empty snack cracker boxes. Another room held only saws."
Despite his fascination with machinery, he was still a naturalist. He knew the area in Blaire Creek very well. He would often explore caves and get lost. He sometimes brought the dog (Dog's Name) with him on these caving expeditions. He canoed, and anyone who saw him fancied him a mountain man. He had some appreciation for aesthetics. (Art Teacher) once described a
passage that Mr. Denisinsky brought to her about the Russian artist,
Kandinsky. The artist had expressed the thrill of squeezing paint out of a tube for the first time in such an artful way that Mr. Denisinsky couldn't resist sharing it with someone. Two years later, (Art Teacher) wanted to tell her class that very passage. When she asked Mr. Denisinsky, he rubbed his beard for a second, then said, "Try page 28." She opened the book and, sure
enough, there it was.
If you've ever seen Mr. Denisinsky's desk, you know it is in complete disarray. Yet, ask the man to locate something, and he finds it within a few seconds. He has the ability to sort chaos. (Random Teacher) once took me to the room across from the math office. He unlocked the door and pointed to hundreds of Ethernet cables snaking around the office. He said, "There! That IS Mr. Denisinsky!" That man could, through such random chaos of wires,
somehow know what everything did and where everything went. He must love the complexity of computers and wires, the ability to pull the guts out and somehow reform them into something manageable.
(Edit: removed section regarding Papa's First Name.)
I believe that a school without a Denisinsky isn't really a school. There is something about Mr. Denisinsky that is irreplaceable. There is just something...Denisinskyian. You have to invent new words to describe him. (Additional Teacher) said, "Words just aren't interesting enough to describe Mr. Denisinsky anymore." There is just something in language that fails to capture the
essence of that man. I asked him what he plans to do after leaving. He said, "Well, I'll see when I leave." When I think of Mr. Denisinsky, I picture a wandering scholar. He wanders the halls of SLUH, wanders around the ceiling, and now he's wandering off to a new place. As a SLUH community, we thank him for his generous service, and we wish him the best of luck in those
wandering places.
_____________________
Of course, my father made a brilliant teacher, and touched the lives of thousands of students at SLUH.
But you will find no mention whatsoever of any of his children, only a vague reference to his (new) wife, and his dog. I would like to point out that his SON (who had the same name as his dog) went with him camping and into those caves a heck of a lot more often than the dog of the same name did. I would also like to point out that his OTHER son attended SLUH and probably knew the Erik in question.
This student loves my father, and thinks he is magical and saintly. But, go back 15 years, and ask one of those students to write about him, and the words that will appear frequently are "Abject fear" and "Strong sullen type" and "Ghostly."
I am pleased that my father has turned his life around and is getting the adoration he has clearly always wanted and never felt that he received. He is, after all, and adult child of alcoholic parents, and has 9 siblings. And he was the bright one who slipped through the cracks.
But I suspect that I will always resent the thousands of SLUH students who got the father I never had. The hundreds of students who he stayed after school to teach and understood, while I was struggling to understand him, or get positive attention from him in the brief hours that he was home. I will resent the students to whom he told his stories, when I only got information about my father and his life through my mother's stories. (Some of which were definitely colored by her opinion.)
Fortunately for me, my father is still alive, and I do spend time with him. Fortunately for me, I am brave enough to reach across the divide and try to make sense of him.
bradhicks knows my father, somewhat independent from his friendship with me. Knows him from that awful period during which I was going through adolescence, actually. And stated that he could never cohabit with Papa because he Papa scares the hell out of him, because Papa is too angry all the time.That felt... validating. Because Papa ISN'T angry all the time... NOW.
But he was. And I wasn't the only one who noticed. Those of you who know me, know that when pushed too far, and the seething rage comes to the forefront... I can be so scary that I can clear a room with a glance. There's a gesture that I can make which will make certain people shrink in terror and fear. I can open a corridor in a crowd of strangers with my very presence when I get like that.
And I don't get that power from my mother.
We were very rarely spanked or struck while I was growing up. No, no. Papa never had to threaten us with a belt or even his hand. I am certain that my brothers and I believed that if we ever pushed him far enough that he had to administer physical punishment... we would not survive. We lived in fear of this man for years.
When I was in High school, and just after I graduated (while I was SMOKIN' HOT) I loved to go to SLUH and flirt with the guys who went to school there. I would get to the point where they were starting to push up on me, when I would casually drop into the conversation that my father taught at SLUH.
"Really? What's his name?"
"Denisinsky. I'm Kukla Denisinsky."
The poor boy(s) would reel in terror. Really. Reel. In. Terror.
"HE's your DAD?!? OMGOMG I'm sorry. Don't tell him I bothered you!"
Heh. Ok, I kind of got off on the power trip. And I never dated anyone from SLUH.
Nowadays when I offer the information to a SLUH student that I am Mr. Denisinsky's daughter, I get an equally explosive reaction.
"He's your DAD? OMGOMG, I love that guy! He's our resident genius! There was this one time when he helped me (Blah blah.)"
Go figure.
Of course, it wasn't until after the divorce that this dramatic transformation occurred. So, I am left to assume that Papa was like that because Mom (and to a lesser degree, we, the children)...
...Made him that way.
It wasn't until he went to live by himself (Surrounded by his tools and books) and got a used dog that he became Mr. Denisinsky, Zen Master.
Yeah. Great. As if my self esteem didn't need that additional kick in the crotch.
Enough for now. And now you all see why posting that story about my offering him money as a tiny child hurt so much to post. Sigh.
