Business
Alumni
Portland Magazine
Athletics
Nursing
September 24, 2015
What is the University of Portland about way down deepest in its bones? This.
by Brian Doyle
I have been trying to get at the deepest University of Portland stories for 25 years now. I have been trying to learn to see and hear them beneath the swirl of the ordinary. They are the extraordinary ordinary. They are always about people. They are never about power and money and status and fame. They are about something else altogether. The something else is what the University is about at its best. All the things you can see about the University are not the best and coolest and deepest things about the University. All the measurements of success are not best and coolest and deepest measurements of success. There is a deeper play. The best things about the University are people like the biology professor Becky Houck, who never left her office before midnight in October, because she knew that lonely freshmen would see her light and shuffle in and unburden their frightened hearts. Like the priests who live in the residence halls and leave their doors ajar at night for broken-hearted kids to tap on the door and ask if they can come in and unburden their shattered hearts. Like Father John Delaunay, who wrote every month to every single student and alumnus in the Second World War — hundreds of letters a month, handtyped, hand-signed, cheerful and chatty, not one of them the same as another. Like Virginia Asuncion, who cleaned the toilets and showers and rooms and kitchens on the third and fourth floors of Mehling Hall for forty years, and knew every girl who lived there by name, and never once had a cold word for them, but treated each one like a sweet shy niece.
Like Gus Little and Travis Vetters. Both played baseball for the Pilots, Gus at second base and Travis in the outfield. Travis went on to play five years in the minors for the Dodgers. Gus married the Pilot soccer player he had fallen head over heels for, Colleen Salisbury. He went to work. But then his kidneys began to fail. To the point where he needed a transplant or he died. He sat one night with his wife and he said I don’t know how to tell people, how do I tell people? And Colleen Little said you have to tell them the truth, Gus. Tell them what’s happening. Give people a chance to love you.
So Gus tells everyone. He calls a breakfast meeting and tells his friends, and they tell their friends, and Gus starts to weep as he says that eight of his teammates said hey, Gus, I’ll give you a kidney, brother, and twenty other people said hey, I’ll give you a kidney, man, and among them were Pilot soccer players male and female, and people I had never met, he says, people I’ll never know. Thirty people basically said to me hey, Gus, I’ll save your life, no problem. Thirty people said that to me. Thirty people.
And one of those people was his baseball brother Travis Vetters.
Travis says to me, says Gus Little, I am going to be the one to give you a kidney, Gus. I know it will be me. And it was Travis. He was the match.
Gus and Travis are wheeled in for the operation. Standing there beaming is their teammate Adam Kerr. He was an outfielder. Now he’s the attending nurse. Here are the three men in this photograph. In this photograph one man is about to save another man’s life, and their teammate is making sure it all goes well, and this is a story of love and affection and respect and reverence. This is a story of courage and humor and how being a teammate never ends. This is a story about the deepest University of Portland things. The words we have for those deepest things are hard to find. But a story says things that words cannot explain. Here is a story of love and courage, of a wise woman saying let people love you, of thirty people saying hey, I’ll save your life, no problem, of a gentle graceful young man named Gustaf Little saying to me, with a smile but with his voice cracking, Thirty people. Thirty. And one of them was Travis.
BRIAN DOYLE is the editor of Portland magazine, and the author most recently of a collection of ‘proems’ called How the Light Gets In (Orbis Books).
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