Rachel King

Sometimes those “eternal moments” in life happen when you least expect them to happen and come from a person that you least expect them to come from. Several of those moments happened for me when I was an undergraduate at a small Christian liberal arts college that no longer exists. Yes, a college that no longer exists but that had a profound effect on my life and probably on the lives of many others who walked its beautiful campus a few miles outside Providence, Rhode Island. But this piece is not about the place it is about a person who taught there, Rachel King.

Dr. King was in her early-eighties when I met her. She had spent years teaching at a well-known New England prep school, was a Yale graduate from long ago who had retired to Providence years before. However, when she retired she somehow found the little college on the road to Newport and offered to teach for one silver dollar a year. Dr. King taught one course each semester in the department of Biblical Studies. She was a sight amidst the undegraduates. She was a very old woman to us. She wore those old lady dresses and walked with a slow and studied pace around the campus and occasionaly I would see her in the snack bar sipping a cup of tea. Her eyesight must have been very poor since she had glasses that magnified her eyes several times over and she always carried a cloth bookbag with a longish handle.

I first spoke with Dr. King during the spring semester of 1976, my sophomore year. I enrolled in her Comparative Religions class which met in a classroom in what used to be one of the stables on the estate that was once our campus. The first day of class she took care of the important things. One of her first questions to this group of nineteen and twenty year olds was to ask us how we preferred to be addressed. At first many of us did not understand what she meant. Addressed? Was she asking us for the post office box number of our campus address? No, she told us that she preferred “Dr. King.” Would we like her to address us by our first name or with our title of “Mr” and “Miss” followed by our last name. Well, for a group of people whose entire experience with the prefix prior to their last name was with their parents and grandparents we quickly opted to be addressed by our first names.

It was a fascinating semester. Each class not only opened our minds to the religions of the world but we were transported back in time to a syle of teaching and by a person who had come out of the best of what can only be described as the “old school.” When we studied the Bhagavad Gita she would recite entire sections of this ancient script from memory. Throughout the semester she would pepper the class with recitations from Homer and other giants of the past, again, all from memory. Quickly this became my favorite class of the semester. Often, following class my classmates and I would talk about it as though we had traveled to some far off place to study and our guide for that journey had taken us there merely with her words. It was truly a semester abroad.

Once I mustered the courage, I remember engaging Dr. King in conversations following class and would occasionaly walk with her to the snack bar. By the end of the semester she and I had developed a nice rapport and just before finals she presented me with a gift, one of the books that she had written and it was inscribed to me. You can imagine, I was awed that she would give me this gift. I still have the book and occasionly leaf through it and remember that semester and Dr. King.

I remember a conversation that she and I had several years following my graduation. I had stayed on at the College working as a recruiter for this little school I loved. Times were tough for colleges without large endowments and without showcase facilities and my alma mater was about to merge with a sister institution. We were to sell our campus that year and move ninety miles north to a strange campus. I ran into Dr. King one day during those last few months as she walked slowly down a grand stairwell that overlooked a beautiful lounge area in the old manor house that stood at the center of the campus. I stopped to talk with her for a moment.

I told her how saddened I was by the fact that my alma mater would not longer be and how difficult it would be to leave behind the people and experiences of the place. She looked at me through her thick glasses and pointed out the rich carpet below us in the lounge, a carpet whose design mirrored the design of the intricate plaster molding on the vaulted ceiling above the lounge. She said, “Do you see that carpet? All the experiences, conversations, relationships and eternal moments that you and many others have experienced here are not lost. They will just be rolled up in a carpet similar to that one and unrolled someday so that they might again be enjoyed.” That moment was a great moment of encouragement to me and it has served to be one of those moments that I call eternal in my life. Thank you, Dr. King.