:: 8/9/2009 :: Steady Eddie ::
Tony Hoagland
His hands had a slight, but insistent tremor to them. Big thick fingers. That may be the first thing I noticed about Steve Orlen. In those days you were allowed to smoke in your office if you were a professor, and at my first conference I saw him lift the orange flame of a match to his Menthol Cool. It trembled, and I wondered if it wasn’t a symptom of what they call The Drink (It wasn’t). Steve had a deep, slightly gravelly voice, a big nose, some acne scars. His eyes seemed slightly unfocused. He was fond of letting you know that he didn’t belong in the academy- he was a J.D., a juvenile delinquent, a hoodlum from Holyoke, Mass. He had a faded blue tattoo of a swallow on his brawny forearm, which, in fact, didn’t look like the arm of a professor.
But above all Steve Orlen gave off an impression of calm, and of steadiness. Everything he did seemed measured and considered, almost slowed down. There was something distinctively un-self-involved about him, like he wasn’t in a great rush to get back to something else more important than you. He wasn’t full of gratuitous manic show-offy intellectual energy, but he issued considered opinions, and he asked actual questions.
This would have been about 1981.
H_NGM_N
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