In Memoriam Leroy Southers
     from Robert Holson:

As I write this, thinking of Leroy, his memory shines through the mists of more than 40 years. Once again we are young, and once again I realize what a truly remarkable person he was, and how much I owe to his mordant wit and penetrating intellect.

Barstow, then, and the 1950s.

We were in 10th grade, children really, when we met, but even then Leroy seemed timeless, curiously adult in ways that were unlike any I had ever encountered.

What I remember: constant motion, constant enthusiasm, everything a part of his love of music and his impatience for the intellectually trite, conforming and compromised.

That he said all the things I had only been able to secretly think.

That suddenly, wonderfully, I was no longer alone.

That he admitted the easy violence and cruelty of the young towards anyone different, a victimization we shared.

That there were alternatives.

That there was magic, passion, feeling, the life of the intellect, alongside and independent of the narrow, constricted hating mean constipated small-town America of the 1950s.

What incredible gifts, what clarity of vision!

How I spent weekend sleep-overs at his home, and the infective excitement of his love for and knowledge of music that filled those weekends, teaching me so much that I had never before encountered in the world of the 50s, with doggies in windows and love, marriage and horseless carriages, trivial, silly beside Leroy's musical offerings.

How I remember especially his playing Resphegi's Pines and Fountains of Rome for the first time for me. Centurions marched down leaf-spangled centuries and past baroque waterworks, and my mind spun with those images and soared with that music.

How once, returning the favor, Leroy spent a weekend in my house, a weekend colored by the memory of Prokofiev's Stone Flower Ballet and of the dogfood sandwich my terrible sisters made for him and he ate uncomplaining, too polite to remark on what he later described as being rather odd, and quite fatty.

How he opened vistas for me, horizons I had only dreamed and suspected, validating these dreams, that there was art and music and the life of the intellect. His outspoken atheism finally allowing me to admit those deep, blasphemous suspicions I had entertained from early childhood, that there was only a vast silence, no there there, no devils, no gods, only human intellect, deeply liberating. Indeed, what could have been and can yet be more liberating in the America of then and now, in the vast stultifying realm of conformity and superstition than his faith in human intellect?

So thank you Leroy, you meant more to me than I can easily acknowledge. You were a mentor and a doorway, a portal to a higher, finer reality that might have remained elusive without your intellectual courage, your deep honesty and insight. For all this you will be remembered, and missed.

Robert Holson
Socorro, New Mexico
2003