I met Gary Bailey while I was a student at the University of Iowa.  He was an associate professor in religion.  I first met him when he assumed instructing the tail end of a course taught by the college’s most popular professor, a rabbi named Jay Holstein.

Holstein had an abrupt, drill-instructor type style.  He paced.  There was a cadence to how he spoke.  He’d occasionally force a stutter to keep the beat.  He swore like a sailor.  When Bailey came in after him, the class would find he possessed nearly all the same eccentricities as Holstein, minus, perhaps, the profanity.

It was so uncanny, within 10 minutes of the start of his first lecture, you could hear the scoff from the several hundred kids in the auditorium.

“What’s this guy trying to do, imitate the last guy?”  Attendance would drop by the score.

The assumption of the students was natural. What I would subsequently learn, however, is that it was simply who he really was.  It was an unfortunate coincidence.

As much as I loved Holstein for the way he read the texts of the Bible, and those of  Melville and Hemingway, there was something about Bailey that read even better.  I would take a small seminar with him.  In that class was Holstein’s son.  Towards the end of the semester I would confide in him.

“You know, I once thought Bailey was just a hack copying your father.  Anymore I think he might be the first genius I’ve ever met, if that were something I could judge.”

“Bailey is a genius.  He’s got a real problem, though.”

“What is that?”

“He’s a white protestant trying to get a job at a time when any religion department that still exists is looking for diversity.”

For Bailey it would be another unfortunate coincidence.

Bailey had asked an interesting question in class that day while we were reading Hemingway.

“What do you guys think is the opposite of love?”

“Hate,” was the response scattered back from those in the small class room with large windows that looked over the street below.

“I’m not going to take that as the right answer.  You guys ought to do some thinking on that.  Let me ask it another way.  What is it that stands in the way of truly loving or hating anybody?”

“Fear,” came from the long, lanky kid who hung out in the back of the room and seldom said much of anything.  He was a loner-type, both in class and out of it.  The only other words I remember from him were the brief, inaudible murmurs shared between he and Bailey whenever our papers came back.

“Fear,” echoed Bailey with a smile of approval.  “You know a very wise person once said that it was a very fine line that separated love or hate from fear, and it was very difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference.”

I’ve never found what came of Gary Bailey.  I have never found who to attribute his quote to.  What I have found, however, is that generally we are quite certain we can tell the difference he spoke about above.  We seldom ever contemplate it.  An unfortunate coincidence, I suppose, for all of us.