Dear Molly,

Do you remember our ethics class taking a field trip to a sculpture garden? Everyone had to bring something to read?  You introduced us to Oliver’s Wild Geese.

You do not have to be good . . . let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

You know it did not occur to me you were sick the first time I saw you. New to my CSW teaching gig, I learned some faculty feared the the school’s reputation as a hippie-dippie place.  You–tall, thin, bald–suggested some version of their worry.  A girl on campus shaved her head. O.K. Whatever.

Stupid me. You had a cancer no one could cure.

At your memorial service your father spoke of you learning another treatment failed to offer hope, excusing yourself  to be alone for thirty minutes before a return to the kitchen and your homework. Yours, he said, was an old soul.

From your hospital bed you did math with help from your doctors.  To come to school on Monday you chose Friday for blood transfusions and chemo.  (Be sick on the weekend.)  Your mom called you her sunny girl.

A few years after your death, a small group of us began to practice guerilla art and anonymous giving on campus.

We held a meeting at some point and came up with a dream agenda:

• Make school awesome

• Make stuff, give away as much as possible, have fun in the process.

• Pay kids to go to school or let them own school or make school absurdly profitable, but reduce the way money grinds down, insulates, and systematizes life and learning

Good. Meeting adjourned. Except, wait, we need a name. “How about Molly?”

Eventually, I emailed your parents to ask if they would approve of this borrowing.  As writing emails go, that one was a trembler.   Now, when people ask, as they must: What is it?  This Molly School?  That’s hard.  You as a thing.  I am not sure Anne can forgive me for that.  I hope you can.

And probably a school with your name should be about curing disease, not about making artists.

“Just poop it out.”

Tom always said about making art in particular. And the only art I have of yours is that baby pooping out a heart.

Molly School: Where we poop out the love. What do you think? Too cheesy? Too poopy?

The soft animal of your body.  The puppy of yourself.  The kitten of who you are.

You were tough as hell and as joyful as a kid in mid-skip.  And your body betrayed you.

I think of you often and look for you in all I meet,

Ted