ARWEN CURRY
During those fragrant summers at Beekay Court in the 1970s and 80s I slept in all of the upstairs bedrooms at one point or another. The five rooms were empty, but they didn’t yet feel vacated. They’d been occupied until recently, and still held traces of the childhoods they hosted—handmade figurines, models, scraps of paper—though in Bo’s and Uncle Lee’s rooms, these ephemera seemed long-forgotten. My aunts’ room was where I usually slept, a room like in a doll’s house, its porcelain-faced Victorian dolls, delicate tea sets in glass cabinets, and the skirted lemon-yellow vanity overlooking the gravel drive.
I snooped around and played with all of these things, but it was Uncle David’s corner room that fed my curiosity the most. Every night I pulled a stack of creased pocket paperbacks from his shelves and devoured them on Aunt Ruthie’s canopy bed: Howling Mad. A Mad Look at TV. Mad Overboard. Dave Berg, Don Martin, and Sergio Aragones. Many times I read them, immersing myself in their absurd, irreverent commentary on times barely past.
So what’s my point, when it comes to David Curry and what he has meant to me as my second-oldest, second-youngest uncle? He’s many things—wry, kind, wise, thoughtful, abstract, generous, enduring. These qualities—these good, rare qualities—were represented elsewhere in that household, and have been passed down as best they could be. But what no one else showed me, what I started to absorb from that musty library of dumb Mad jokes, was the wonder of appreciation, of fandom—in other words, of discernment—in art, music, humor, literature. David knew then and knows now how to seek out what’s good, and to draw it close like a fortress of protection against the world’s stupidity, cruelty, and meaninglessness. What’s more, he never hoards this knowledge, or competes with it the way some do—but shares it, joyfully.
I’ve only seen David in action as a teacher briefly, but clearly that’s what he was doing with his students, too—sharing great ideas, beautiful paths of inquiry. I’m sure he won’t stop, now that he’s retired. Maybe—is it too much to hope for?—he’ll have time for a book.