From the memorial service (pardon the length)...

Leslie Michael Marenchin was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on June 8, 1954, and he grew up in nearby Hermitage. To help visualize his world, Leslie always referred me to the Deer Hunter, which was filmed in those parts.

His mother, Becky, was a school administrator, and his father, Michael, a mechanic, welder, and a jack of all trades…this was a guy who built his own house. Leslie had two older sisters, Shelly and Renee.

Tragedy struck early for Leslie’s family: Shelly, the oldest, died in adolescence. This explains in large part why Leslie and Renee remained so close for the rest of their lives. His mother died in 1996, his father only 2 years ago.

Leslie attended the Hickory School system in Hermitage, and graduated from high school in 1972. His friends described him at the time as the “skinniest kid” they ever knew. And of course, the funniest.

He attended Millersville State University in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1976 with a bachelor’s in political science/English literature.

Eventually, Leslie followed his sister, Renee, to Houston, where he enrolled in the graduate philosophy program at Rice. He completed his Master’s Degree in 1983, and his Ph.D. in 1988.

While at Rice he taught English as a Second Language, and after graduating, began to teach philosophy at Texas A&M in 1989. After a few years there, he returned to Houston to teach at University of Houston Clear Lake, Texas Southern University, Rice University, University of Saint Thomas, Kingwood College, University of Houston Downtown, and University of Houston Central Campus, where he continued to teach until he left us. Over the course of his academic career, he taught basic philosophy courses, graduate courses in metaphysics and the philosophy of education, and courses in the history of western civilization. He also taught small groups outside of the university environment. Just folks who wanted to learn and talk about philosophy, and they’d meet in coffeeshops or in somebody’s house in West U. and talk about important ideas.

As a scholar, his area of expertise was Analytic Philosophy. And at the time of his death, he had developed a summer course in Europe, and was working on proposals for developing a textbook for a course in Business Ethics based in part on his work on Immanuel Kant.

Leslie was a man of wild and complex contradictions:
He could be profound and silly in the same sentence.
He could hold forth in one breath on metaphysics and tell a dirty joke in the next.
He was fiercely logical and insanely irrational (he played the lotto for god’s sake, religiously).
He was brutally honest but always gracious, and had manners that would have made his mama proud.

He loathed pretension and pomposity. And enjoyed playing the fool, letting the air out of windbags, hypocrites and the self-righteous.

And he had the PUREST of hearts.

Above all, Leslie was FUNNY.
But to say that he merely told JOKES would fail to give him the credit due.

His was a non-stop monologue of hilarity, filtering the world through his unique sensibility, and leveling everyone within earshot with his take.

He wasn’t just funny. He was gut-busting, tear-inducing, pants peeing funny.

And no, he wasn’t always politically correct. And sometimes he stepped over the line, in and out of the classroom.

But his humor was never mean or petty. It was, if anything, CELEBRATORY, as if to say, “Can you fucking believe people? I want more!”

His sense of humor played a big part in his teaching, of course.

Leslie was a born teacher—it was all he ever wanted to do. And it was in the classroom that he was most at home.

If you’ve had a chance to visit the blog we created in his memory, you’ve learned that he was wildly popular with his students: in fact, he was consistently ranked by student evaluations to be among the top ten percent of professors at UH. He loved nothing more than challenging kids, and making them think and consider the possibility that the view of the world they showed up to class with might not be the one they should leave with. And most of them appreciated the challenge.

Other than the classroom, the place he was most at home were social gatherings. He was in his element at parties, where he’d glide across the room from group to group, spreading his silliness.

Leslie was a stranger to no one. The world over. I was always amazed at the ease with which he made friends, instantly and everywhere. I remember, after a day and a half in Istanbul with Leslie, Renee and I lost him one afternoon. As you know, if you’ve been to Turkey, everyone and their mother try to sell you a carpet on the street. So Renee and I set off to find him, asking each of the carpet hawkers we passed if they had seen Leslie. (We identified Leslie by miming his silver afro with our hands.) To a person, they would smile and say, yes, yes, and point the way: everyone knew Leslie. Of course, it helped that he had bummed cigarettes from every single one of them.

Leslie was a great travel companion for that reason. And I was fortunate to take many great trips with Leslie. Most memorably, a couple of years ago, I stood with Leslie on top of the Acropolis, which was so important to him and the focus of so much of what he taught. And I got to share his glee—like that of a little boy—when he saw the death mask of Agamemnon…and the statue of Herakles that he first saw in his first Latin textbook.

I met Leslie in graduate school, and I didn’t know what to think of him at first. I was in the English graduate program at Rice, he was in philosophy. The literature students would meet at Willy’s Pub every Friday evening to drink beer, commiserate, talk literature, philosophy, and try to figure out what the hell they were doing. Leslie, from over in philosophy, started dropping in. He was the only non-literature student there. I couldn’t figure out why: He admitted later that it was because there were many more WOMEN studying English than philosophy. Leslie and I agreed, years later, that we probably learned as much from these Friday night adventures—especially from our mentor professor Bill Piper—as we learned in any classroom at Rice.

Something clicked back then, and Leslie and I soon became friends which we remained ever since. I’ve gotten to know Leslie pretty well over 3 decades. Some things you might now know about him:

--He was good at fixing things, building things. Learned from his father, who EACH WEEK would take apart his lawnmower to soak the parts in gasoline…his father’s philosophy was: if you weren’t willing to go to such ends to take care of things, you shouldn’t own anything.

This was also the man who insisted that Leslie each week sweep their gravel driveway with a broom.

--Leslie was obsessively neat. So much so that one of his girl friends called him obsessive compulsive. He told her that he’d prefer to refer to himself as “fastidious.”.

--Who knows the significance of this for Leslie, but for him there was a rightful place for EVERY OBJECT in his world. Or he’d obsessively find one. You’d sit down to dinner with him and he’d, without thinking about it, arrange the silverware and salt shaker just so. To play with him, while he was distracted, we’d move the fork slightly out of place, and without missing a beat and without even noticing what he was doing, he’d slide it back into place. Where it was SUPPOSED to be.

--I want to dispel a myth about Leslie. His wardrobe, contrary to what his students may have thought, did not exclusively consist of a blazer, starched white shirts, and blue jeans. In the 1990s, he shook things up by acquiring 2 pairs of linen shorts, which he then sported around the world…which calls to mind an image forever burned in my head: I joined Leslie at a conference in Hawaii where he was giving a paper, and he wouldn’t go near the water—in fact, Leslie didn’t learn to swim until he was an adult, and he never considered himself a strong swimmer. So while I swam, he sat on a towel, in his linen shorts and starched white shirt on the sand, smoking a cigarette, as contented as the BUDDHA just to be there.

--You should also know that Leslie spent 6 months of his adolescence in a body cast that stretched down to his knees, immobilizing him. He suffered from scoliosis, and lived with a steel rod in his back for the rest of his life.

But it wasn’t all bad: Not able to move, Leslie retreated into the world of books for the first time in his life. It was a determinative period for him. His best friend at the time, Bill Evans, who would ride his bike over and sit with Leslie every afternoon, told me that Leslie began reading Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and even Bertrand Russell. And turning his friends onto these writers. This was the genesis of his intellectual career.

Bill also said that at this time—I love this image of Leslie—they’d routinely stay up as late as they could, and “when the air was right,” fix an AM radio with a wire coat hanger and listen to the crackling excitement of a someone called Bruce Springsteen blasting his music all the way from New Jersey.

A few other tidbits:

--In 8th grade, he and several of his best friends concocted a plan to taunt junior high school classmates by breaking into school and leaving pranks in their lockers. This was sophisticated stuff: for example, they wanted to leave a box of oatmeal in one girl’s locker because they thought she looked like a horse. They pulled it off: slipping out of Leslie’s house at 2 in the morning, dressed in all black, running the 5 miles to school, entering a skylight and—like some grand heist movie—lowering themselves by rope into the kitchen. Some of them were called into the principal’s office the next day…but as his friend Bill told me, none of them “cracked” under the pressure and they got off.

--Leslie studied ballroom dancing. To meet women, of course.

--He swam naked at Walden Pond.

--And he wrote a screenplay called Cathedral of Ash (with me), which I think he is pleased has not seen the light of day.

We found taped to his computer sticky notes with the following quotes, which I assume he regarded as principles to live by. They confirm for me that Leslie sought truth at any cost, believed living an ethical life was essential, and, most importantly, that one had to strive always to participate in all that life had to offer and to engage others at any cost.

A quote from the Roman lyric poet Horace: Sapere Aude! Dare to know!

An unattributed quote: Things are never what they seem.

A quote from the Roman philosopher Lucretius: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. “Fortunate he, who was able to learn the causes of things.”

A quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca: Colamus humanitatem. “Cherish humanity.”

From philosopher Karl Popper, “Minimize avoidable suffering. “

From Lee Kwon Yew: “Those who opt out, they suffer.”

From the Gospel of St. Thomas:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

And one he quoted to me often, and which I knew he held dear: From E.M. Forster: “ONLY CONNECT.”

There’s no way to contain this man in a single eulogy, so I’ll give up trying. But in closing, I want to read something an old friend wrote me about Leslie:
“Where where has my madman gone? He was the smartest and the dumbest. God, he could jauntily walk right into it. And that was what I so loved about him—watching him coming toward me, drink in hand, ready to have an evening of to and fro, wry and ribald, his head full of big ideas, his heart full of conflict. The combination was potent, though he had a way of sneaking up on you as if he was just some guy, some regular guy out for laughs. He was anything but a regular guy. He was the most complicated guy I’ve ever known. I am devastated at his loss. I can’t imagine what you must feel except that it must be breathtaking to lose his side of the commentary. Your partner in crime.

She finally asks, “Oh what would he have made of such a fate?”

Surely, somehow, he would have found a way to make us laugh.

--Keith "Freebird" Johnson