David Rising Pritchard – 50th Reunion Essay

David Rising Pritchard

1 Kingsley Ave.

Haydenville, MA 01039

sunkenscow@aol.com

413-268-3668

Spouse(s): Ellen Wittlinger (1978–)

Child(ren): Kate (1980); Morgan (1984)

Grandchild(ren): Rose (2012), Jane (2015)

Education: Yale University, BA (1969); U. of Iowa, Writers Workshop, MFA (1974)

National Service: Peace Corps (1969–71)

Career: Editor, American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Co. (Boston), for 22 years

Avocations: Conservation, Birding, Citizen Science, Literacy

College: Berkeley

Freshman year, third floor of Welch Hall. I had two roommates who were, like me, the younger brothers of senior classmates who had graduated earlier that year. We’d never met, but our older brothers were friends, and when they realized their younger brothers had all been accepted at Yale, they encouraged us to room together, which we did. I continued to room with Don Bordley for the rest of my time at Yale, just as our older brothers had done. Jim, however—the third younger brother—broke that little mold.

When Don and I got back from Christmas break we learned to our surprise that Jim wasn’t coming back. I knew he’d been unhappy. He’d called his parents and girlfriend back in Texas all the time, back when long-distance calls cost money. So, sure—homesick, carrying the flame. But to drop out of Yale after one semester to go to SMU? It had never occurred to me you could actually do that.

And yet I was quite unhappy that first year myself, and told my parents that summer that I wasn’t going back. Yale, for me, had been a path of least resistance. I was a good student at a Midwest public high school (geographic distribution!), and I had a lot of legacy. Not just my brother, but my grandfather (Skull and Bones) and my great-uncle Ted (still considered—sorry, BD—Yale’s greatest football player). But somehow I’d never asked myself if Yale was actually the right school for me. Maybe I should have broken the mold myself—gone West, say, rather than East—small rather than big. Anything but Yale.

Obviously, I came back. My unhappiness was very different from Jim’s, and, I see now, couldn’t have been fixed just by changing schools. I got some much-needed therapy and went on to enjoy those next three years—the friends (Don, best man Peter Shull, wise guy Bob Beach, among many others), the slaved-over papers, the late-night sessions, the ever wider circles of knowledge and experience. By the time we graduated, of course, pretty much everything besides the war seemed extraneous. I joined the Peace Corps, got a high draft number, was accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, concluded I wasn’t that kind of writer, and took a tangential path through the world of literature and publishing, starting with literary translation and ending up a senior editor at the American Heritage Dictionary. Marriage, family, children and now grandchildren—I feel pretty lucky.

Looking back, I’m glad of the memories and thankful for a topnotch liberal education, however impractical it may appear to today’s students. But I’ve often wondered—what if I, like Jim, had wised up and asked myself what I actually wanted? Of course he knew what he wanted, and at that point I didn’t, so there’s that. And then, too, the wisdom of years has led me to conclude that, no matter how you navigate Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, you end up at yourself.