I am Roman Catholic, a convert.
I have worshiped in many Protestant denominations in my youth. Some of my closest friends in college were converts to Catholicism, and through them I began to double-dip, i.e., worship in two different churches on Sunday.
When I fell in love with Laura and we agreed to marry, I decided that I wanted us to worship together. Since she was a Catholic since birth, I converted and joined the Catholic Church officially on the Easter of 1987.
Music has always been a large part of my life. It is through participating in musical ensembles that I have learned to work with others.
I played the clarinet from third grade though college. In graduate school, there was not enough time left for the daily practice that I needed to stay competent, so I put the instrument away.
In graduate school, I took nine months of lessons on the classical guitar. My college roommate, Mark Lasky, had played the instrument and I always loved the sound. While I knew that I would never excel at the instrument, I did grow in my appreciation of its music. I still love its sound, and have been fortunate enough to see two of its greatest players (Christopher Parkening and Eliot Fisk) in concert.
I sang in church choirs from 1988 to 1999. During that time my singing improved a good deal; special thanks go to Jonathan Green and Richard Cook, successive choral directors at Elon. I learned a good deal from both of them while singing with the Concert Choir and Chamber Singers for a total of five years.
Since the summer of 2004 I have returned to singing as a bass in our church choir and cantoring. My work and family lives have demanded more and more of my attention, and it has been hard to maintain the prayer life that I started as a younger man. Sacred music has always been there for me, particularly in times of trouble. I have never been more than a song away from being comforted.
It doesn't take much prodding to get me to start singing some profane music. The Philadelphia radio stations that I grew up with served us Motown and classic rock, and I have a good appreciation for musical roots. (As Duke Ellington said, if it sounds good, it is good.) I can still let hours slip by bopping to Steely Dan, trying to pick a harmony line out of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, playing air harmonica along with old Stevie Wonder, trying painfully hard to sing along with Al Green's tenor, or lingering on the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel.
I am a voracious reader, probably because of ill health in my youth. I have found it harder in recent years to slow down enough to really enjoy deeper novels. Most of my fictional reading as of late has been limited to mysteries and programming books. As to the exceptions, my latest favorites have included Richard Russo and Martin Cruz Smith. I have started re-reading a good deal of Calvin Trillin's essays; Trillin can make me laugh uncontrollably and then break my heart on the same page. His work "Killings" about the effects of murders on the communities surrounding them still haunts me.
I have always enjoyed reading books on mathematics and computer science; some of my favorite authors are Paul Halmos and Donald Knuth.
While I do not take the time to re-read them, the authors that I read in college are the ones that seem to have shaped me most. George Orwell's non-fiction (especially Homage to Catalonia ) showed me that in the face of widespread deceit and obfuscation, the search to discern between right and wrong was always worth the effort. Here is a picture of George:
Graham Greene's short stories stay with me; Stanislaw Lem's science fiction probably did more to encourage my mathematical creativity than any of my instructors. Carlos Castaneda showed that what was real and what was obvious were often two very different things.
I love to cook. (I love to eat, and somehow, the two have always been linked in my mind.) On any given weekend I can be found stir-frying something. My parents and I share a fondness for sharp knives, and I am grateful that they got me interested in cooking before I ran afoul of the law.
I am an expert of sorts on movies of the past, having watched very, very many of them with my father. Yale is a school that values cinema, and with its film societies I managed to see 84 films my first semester there. (That semester was my best in terms of GPA. In later semesters I saw fewer films and my GPA dropped. Coincidence? I don't think so.)
I explored Judo, Aikido, and T'ai Chi Chuan in my younger days. I never wanted to become Bruce Lee, but I did want to become more comfortable with my own body.
I began studying Yoga in 1985, and that is probably the one physical discipline that I will continue until the day I die.
Here is a picture of me in pain from my Judo class:
In graduate school I took up long-distance running, and ran in the New Haven Labor Day Road Race (twenty kilometers) four years in a row. After a gap of over twenty years I have begun running again as of 2005. It has not been easy but the pain is an old friend.
Jeffrey Clark