From Shakespeare to the Bone Marrow Unit

Sidney Homan did not intend on becoming a Shakespearian scholar and author. As a youngster growing up in Philadelphia, he planned on following in his father’s footsteps installing telephones.

It was September of 1956, and Homan was an apprentice telephone installer — a student to his father. His mother, an actress, had bigger plans for her son.

“‘Rise and shine, Sidney,’” my mother would say to me,” Homan said, as he relaxed on a chair in his home in Gainesville. “‘Get up and make something of yourself,’ she said. I only know now what her subtext was: ‘Be something more than your father.’”

Homan came from a neighborhood where no one went to college, he said. He loved his father and wanted to do something constructive; he wanted to learn how to install telephones.

“‘Oh no, you are going to Princeton,’” Homan said, quoting his mother. She had just read a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had attended Princeton, and she reasoned if it was good enough for Fitzgerald, it was good enough for her son.

As Homan tells it, his mother drove him to Princeton, charged in, spotted the sign for “Office of the Dean of Admissions,” and dragged him in.

“She sees the dean’s inner office,” Homan said, with a smile. “The secretaries are rising. But she learned in the theater not to let secretaries run interference.”

She barged into Dean Harrison’s office and introduced herself. The dean politely asked her to leave the room so that he could chat with her son. As she reluctantly left, she turned at the door and, in true theatrical style, said, “Harrison, the boy’s good. You’re gonna love him.”

Homan apologized for his mother, but the dean said he found her refreshing. The two spent the next hour and a half talking.

“The words just poured out of me.” Homan said. “I’m from a neighborhood where kids were not talked to.”

Thus began Homan’s education at Princeton. Many of his fellow students became lawyers and doctors, but Homan took a different path.

“I fell in love with those English professors,” Homan said. “They knew how to pour wine and they smoked pipes and I could talk with them about Shakespeare and Keats.”

He earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1965, and remained involved in theater, a passion that began at age five and continues to this day.

While teaching at the University of Illinois, Homan said he “naively” went to the college theater, which was a closed shop back then. No one in their department would appear in other productions, and vice versa.

One night, he and his friends had some drinks and wandered downtown to an abandoned train depot. Inspiration struck. They rented the building for $100 a month and founded the Depot Theater.

“It was wonderful,” Homan said. “I believe in learning by doing. If I was teaching Hamlet, I could do a play.”

While Homan loves his chosen career, he still feels the need to “do something,” like his father had. And in conversations with his father, this would come up.

“‘Sid,’ my dad would say. ‘You went to Princeton, right? Son, you became an English teacher. You know, you could always change your profession,’” Homan said with a smile. “In the last few years of his life, we’d have the same conversation. He would get mellow at the end, and say, ‘You know Sid, we’re both in communications.’”

In 1972, Homan came to Gainesville to teach at the University of Florida. He married and raised a family. He and his second wife Norma have been married 31 years. Like many parents, he enjoyed telling stories of his life to his children.

In the early 1990s, Homan became involved in the Arts in Medicine program at Shands Teaching Hospital. John Graham-Pole, a Pediatric Oncologist who was instrumental in beginning the program, asked Homan to tell stories to the gravely ill children in the bone marrow unit.

From these experiences, Homan has written a book entitled, “A Fish in the Moonlight: Growing Up in the Bone Marrow Unit.” Homan described his first non-scholarly work as two stories in one.

“It is about growing up in Philly in the‘40s and ‘50s,” Homan said, “and what happened when I told those stories; the interactions with the kids.”

Homan recounted a story he told the children about Uncle Eddie, the alcoholic barber, the black sheep of the family. Uncle Eddie’s brother had passed away, and at the funeral, Uncle Eddie, in the depths of his sorrow, jumped into the coffin with his dead brother.

“The men pulled him out,” Homan said. “But it seemed beautiful to me.”

Homan panicked after telling the story to the children, realizing he had joked about death to a room of sick children. But he was told he did just the right thing.

“‘That’s exactly why you are here,’ they told me,” Homan said. “We need to confront this.”

As artist in residence, each Wednesday for three years Homan shared his stories with the children in the bone marrow unit — until he was asked to talk to teens in the psychiatric unit. The last story in the book is about leaving the bone marrow unit. It is a story about change.

“Once the word got around, the kids were in a downcast mood,” Homan said. “At the end of the story they started making comments. Started talking about changes. In one sense, [the book] refers to the kids, but the other ‘growing up’ is my own growing up.”

Coming from a practical family, Homan said he tries in his profession to make his work practical. He was visiting the kids not so much as an entertainer, but to see how he could contribute — and he learned a lot in the process.

Eventually, because of other obligations, he left the arts in medicine department. His son, “a budding young writer,” challenged him, calling him a dull academic who should try writing prose.

“When you are challenged by your kid, you take up the challenge,” Homan said.

So he wrote about his life growing up in Philadelphia and his experiences with the children in the bone marrow unit. He put it together and sent it to Purdue University Press.

“They accepted it,” Homan said. “I have to tell you, at age 70, this is a whole new experience for me. I’ve spent my whole life writing scholarly books. You get polite letters from friends. But with this book, it’s on Amazon.com, people review it, and you get letters — from friends and from perfect strangers.”

One letter came from a childhood buddy, who was the inspiration for the book’s title.

As Homan tells it, while in high school, he and his buddies snuck out of the house to swim in the lake at the country club. They went over the fence with their bottles of beer, stripped down to their underwear and jumped in.

“It was doubly wonderful because it was illegal,” Homan said with a broad smile.

Then came the red-and-blue lights of a police cruiser. Three of the lads grabbed their clothes and ran for the woods. But one friend stayed.

“Connie was the crazy guy in the group,” Homan said. “Wonderfully crazy. He was half-in half-out of the water and had very white skin. The moon was shining on his glistening white skin.”

The officers asked him what he thought he was doing. He said, “I’m a fish. A fish in the moonlight.”

The cops backed away. Homan and his friends eluded the law.

“I got a letter from Connie, 54 years later,” Homan said. “Norma and I invited him to visit.”

The friends reunited and talked about the old days and what they have been doing for the past half-century. And right on cue, his friend remembered and recited the line: “I’m a fish. A fish in the moonlight.”

Homan had told the story of the late-night swim to the children in the bone marrow unit. In the end, it was his father who came to find him and take him home.

“Dad came to the spot,” Homan said. “Dad was the hero. Dad and I drove home in silence. I knew he wasn’t angry. Dad understood.”

He described to the children how his father brought him home and how he would jiggle the door each night before going to sleep, making sure everyone was safe.

But one of the children in the unit had died.

“They were jittery,” Homan said. “[The hospital staff] make their world secure — but their world had been jolted by the news. It is very personal, but I know they felt good because they wanted another story. They would take what I told them and you could see them weaving it into their own lives. My life was not the issue.”

Homan tries to make sense of his life through his writing.

“One of the things I worry about is everything just slipping away,” he said. “But I’ve come to think — and I was telling Connie this — every moment in life is precious. Every moment has its own validity at the time. Go back and visit [those moments]. Think about them. Assess them, and see if you can make some use of them.”

For Homan, it goes back to being useful. Last year, he became Teacher of the Year, something of which he is rightfully proud. He is not installing telephones, but he is doing his level best to transform his students into thinking, socially conscious citizens.

“I’ve always wanted to be useful,” Homan said. “I’ve written 10 books on Shakespeare, but this book is really special. I love this in a way that I don’t love the others. I’m thrilled doing it. It makes me feel young doing it.” §

BOOK SIGNING
“A Fish in the Moonlight”
September 21, 2 p.m.
Goering’s Book Store
1717 NW First Avenue
Gainesville

Albert Isaac is Editor in Chief at Tower Publications.
He may be contacted at editor@towerpublications.com.