TOM LEE CURRY
In families with many children there are often natural dividing lines between groupings of siblings. The divisions are a consequence of many factors, such as the children’s age differential, the parents’ ages and availability, and the family’s finances.
In our family, I think the point of flexion came with David. He was both a party to the lives of the older group, including Bo, me, and Ruthy, and a party to the lives of the younger cohort of Laurie and Clinton, truly a middle child. I don’t think our family dynamic changed much over the years. Mom and Dad were solicitous and involved with us all, I believe, though Daddy was gone a good deal the year he went to Dallas to work. And of course the world was changing during those years. By the time Ruthy graduated high school, the Vietnam War was over, and the civil rights movement had settled into a less dramatic social concern and source of generational conflict, for better or worse.
David is the youngest of our siblings whose childhood I had the opportunity to participate in to any significant degree. I changed his diapers, babysat him, shared the violin with him, played with him at Mexico Beach on vacation, and taught him to ride a motorcycle in the backyard at Beekay Ct. From my point of view, David was always quiet and somewhat timid, but of course I was a much older brother, and that must have been somewhat intimidating for him, though never intended.
He had Bo’s interest in games and in science fiction, interests I did not share. I remember when mom confided in Mr. Al Lopez her concern that David only read science fiction and comic books. Mr. Al was himself a science fiction buff, and I believe shared books he’d read with David. Mr. Al told mom that she shouldn’t worry, that reading anything at all at David’s age (within limits obviously) was to be encouraged. He was certainly correct in David’s case. I would not have guessed, when David went to college, that he would end up spending his career as a philosophy professor. I think David, like the rest of us, was a late bloomer. Certainly neither I, nor any of my brothers, really had a clue what we were about when we went to college, and we weren’t quick to figure it out. David did most of his growing up somewhere out of my sight.
I was never under the illusion that I might be a polymath. Therefore, I have for years found it comforting to believe that my family makes me part of an organism much larger, more knowledgeable and competent than myself. Bo has the science I will never have, Ruthy the music, David the philosophy, Laurie the law and Clinton the business. Corinthians 12:26 says it perfectly, “If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” Over the years, I have oddly felt less disconcerted by my ignorance of many, many subjects by the knowledge that my siblings, and now my children, nieces and nephews, have those fields covered. Admittedly, that coin has a flip side; no Curry has ever been accused of being unwilling to argue a topic concerning which they are essentially illiterate. At any rate, all of this to say that David’s knowledge of philosophy has relieved me of the need to read a great many tedious books, and for that I am grateful.
As an adult, nothing has been a bigger treat for me, or provided more fond memories, than sharing so many vacations with the David Currys: from Beekay Court to Cape San Blas, to Potsdam, Ireland and Spain. I am immensely grateful to Betty and Denise for indulging my need, and I suspect my brother’s as well, to spend as much time together as possible. In Colorado, a ski instructor told me once that the aspen tree was the largest organism on the planet. Love is like the aspen tree. Its roots spread out long years into an unforeseen future, and lay beneath the foundations of the world.
With David retiring, I look forward to more time together, more travel together, more conversation, more laughter, and of course more arguing together. And I anxiously await his version of Idiot to Idiot, which I’m afraid to think might just be a bit too ironic.