JOAN MOSER’S MEMORIAL
Years ago I got a government grant to take a group of faculty to India to get the materials to create an Indian village in the Williams building, a log assembly hall at Warren Wilson College.
Joan Moser was one of the people in our group and I got to know her on that trip. The Moser compound is on Buckeye Cove across Route 70 on a beautiful mountainside. Her parents were school teachers in Asheville and Joan and her brother and sister grew up here. Joan taught Appalachian Studies at Warren Wilson and for a while, before she had a terrible fall on campus, she took students every other year on an Appalachian term to introduce them to Appalachian culture. All of her family are folk musicians who met once a week to make music.
Joan died just as Todd, Susie and I were leaving for our two and a half months trip and I didn’t learn about her death or the memorial until a couple of days ago.
Memorials are bittersweet. You always wish that the person who died could be here to hear the stories that people tell about them. We honor their brief lives and wonder about our own brief lives. Joan died at 88. She touched so many lives with her teaching and her presence. Only a few of the people she touched were able to come to her memorial. But she brought together those of us who could come and we enjoyed talking with each other. We ate barbecued pork with fixings and listened to stories about Joan and then the family and friends played the music that Joan loved and sang along and then in the end we sang A Parting Glass and toasted Joan with champagne and went home both happy and sad.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 