Commentary: Stern remembered for his fine mind, sharp wit

Monday, March 25, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

LATELY, the universe seems a great cosmic accordion held in the mighty arms of the late Clifton Chenier, pumping alternate rhythms of a zydeco boogie or a Cajun waltz.

Sometimes it's a frantic and exhilarating dance beat moving us beyond our limitations and to the point of collapse. And then it shifts gears into a lazy river ride, slow and steady, drifting on the currents, allowing us time to catch our breath.

In Chenier's muscular hands, the universe expands and contracts almost simultaneously, folding past into present, here into there, creating a Southern fried mantra no holy roller dharma bum can reproduce.

Oom-pah, inhale-exhale. Oom. Pah. Breathe in. Breathe out.

It's been almost 18 months since my wife and I have danced and drifted from Tallahassee to Las Vegas, and even as the miles have stretched between us and our friends, the world seems to have grown smaller.

And recent sad events have sent us reeling backward, making us reconnect with those with whom we had lost touch to share the sorrow of a dear friend's passing.

And we owe it all to technology.

That post-modern Prometheus, science, has given us the ability to link electronically with our friends and families, but with every gift it brings us, it bears a levy on our souls.

A telephone call from a friend in New York Tuesday night brought us the news that Jerry Stern had died after three years fighting off the cancer that finally took him at 57.

After the call, we hopped on the Internet to alert friends far afield who had not yet heard the word. Brief messages shot back and forth through the Ethernet. How sad. How weird. So sorry.

Stern, a frequent commentator on National Public Radio, taught creative writing for 30 years to students eager to bear the fire of the word or to hear him lecture on pop culture. Those students became loyal friends, and my wife was proud to count herself among them.

A founder of the Florida State University's English Department's creative writing program, Stern also had the loyalty and respect of his colleagues, and his sprawling brick house was the center of Tallahassee's literary social life.

We've got our last times with Jerry preserved on videotape, when he and his wife, Maxine, came to our wedding almost two years ago, after he'd beaten back his first bout of cancer.

It was good to see him as his old wise-cracking self, clearly enjoying the company of the 50 or so guests at our wedding, most of them colleagues or former students.

And then we moved out West. We didn't hear from Jerry until last September, after he'd had a seizure caused by what turned out to be incurable brain lesions.

The horrible thing is the brain cancer robbed Jerry of the singular quality most of us will remember him by -- his fine, sharp mind and razor wit.

Anyone who has listened to NPR over the years may have heard Jerry's wry observations about pop culture and modern society, from window treatments to the insidious use of the word "just" to diminish a thought or action. As in "Just Do It" or "Just Say No."

It was by radio I was able to hear Jerry's voice one more time. Driving to the video store, NPR announced, somewhere between a piece on Taiwan and Comet Hyakutake, that there would be a short memorium to Jerry Stern.

I prolonged the drive, detouring through neighborhoods and down streets I had never seen before so I could hear the tribute. I stopped for gas, and they still hadn't run the piece, so finally I pulled into the video store parking lot, turned off the motor, and waited.

Finally, it came. I sat and listened as the host talked about Jerry, played excerpts from a couple of his essays and interviewed fellow professor Hunt Hawkins.

And then it was over, as bright and quickly extinguished as a comet. I turned off the radio and sat there in wonderment. Here I was 2,000 miles away from Tallahassee in a truck parked outside a video store waiting for a comet to streak across the sky, with the sound of Jerry's voice still ringing in my ears.

I cried. I wiped my eyes and wandered into the video store, looking for a movie that would make me forget, suspend time and get me past this moment.

Something wry and clever that Jerry would have appreciated, like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Or something knowing and contemporary that tapped into our current fears about technology, like "Hackers" or "The Net."

Or better yet, a movie of such emotional impact that it would squeeze my chest like Clifton Chenier pumping a big black accordion and leave me too wrung out and numb to feel anything for awhile.

Something to remind me to breathe in, breathe out. Oom. Pah.