Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Jeff Sousa: Words for Tim

For my first year at the University of Chicago, Tim was like family. We lived together on the top floor of Snell, and - together with Jon Cowperthwait - we tended to do everything as a unit. We migrated from dorm room to dorm room, staying up to make sense of the Marx-Engels reader or to brag about O-Week conquests. Consequently, my memories of Tim don't take the form of character-defining moments. I remember him as a fixture. At Woodward or BJ, he was a brother at the table.
That said, there are images and sound bytes of Tim that have stayed with me. Rather than editorialize and try to present a specific view of Tim, I'd like to simply let them stand as fragments of the quirk and undying warmth he has impressed upon us.

Shortly after O-Week, Tim kept talking up the band Tortoise. I was ignorant of them at the time. He bought us tickets to go see their show at the Metro. As soon as we got there we were turned away at the door - the show was twenty-one plus. So, we ended up spending the evening at a neighboring McDonald's, trying to make sense of the Midwestern-ness around us (we are both from New England). Seven years later I finally downloaded Tortoise on iTunes. They're now one of my favorite bands. Every time I listen I'm reminded not just of Tim's sophisticated and precocious musical taste, but also of our "soda" vs. "pop" anthropological bullshit session at McDonald's.

Tim and I had a "dude" heart-to-heart about my situation with a girl who…well…would not put out. Tim was shocked and immediately offered his sympathies, appropriating Plato's concepts of "the forms" and "excellence" to champion pre-marital sex. "We have the equipment. I mean, yeah. Heh. We oughtta use it." After our chat he wandered back into his dorm room and sat down to finish his paper on Plato.

Mostly I remember Tim on Easter morning of our first year. Tim didn't have a tie so I lent him one of mine. I also showed him how to tie it. We primped ourselves in the hallway of the dormitory under the fluorescent light, and then the three of us went to mass - a family.

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