The land is tilled, the seeds are planted. The old man is pleased. He wakes up every morning and sees his garden beyond the bedroom window. There is not much to look at – not now at least. The ground is brown and bare, but this is not the old man’s first garden. He has been tilling and planting since he was 6 years old. He knows life is stirring below the surface.

That’s not all he knows.

“I can’t think of a more optimistic enterprise than to plant a garden,” Paul Zopf says. “There’s no guarantee I’ll be around to harvest anything, but I’m going to weed, I’m going to water and I’m going to look after it because that garden keeps me going. Just talking about it gives me vigor.”

Leave it to one of Guilford College’s most profound and popular faculty members to bring meaning to a naked garden so late in his own season. Even now, all these years later, Paul is teaching, still offering lessons masquerading as conversations.

Friends and alums who drop by his colonial house on George White Road say the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology & Anthropology emeritus is just as engaging, just as self-deprecating at 93 as he was 66 years ago when he first stepped on campus. His declining health hasn’t slowed his wisdom and wit. “I used to comb my hair,” Paul says. “Now I count them.”

See?

Get Paul on the right topic, and that wobbly voice grows in strength overwhelming the room with the cadence of a Baptist minister bent on saving lost souls. On a recent March afternoon, he turned an audience of one in his living room into a classroom for nearly three hours.

With the greatest of ease Paul weaves together his Quaker faith, his beloved late wife Evelyn, and, of course, Guilford, his mistress of 34 years.

About the latter: Inevitably memories from his time at the College always come up when the phone rings. His recollections have grown into long stories, but no one complains. Everyone who drops by the way old friends do says Paul is doing great.

“Talking with him is one of the highlights of my week,” says Karen Blum ’72, who writes to Paul faithfully and calls several times a month. “We always reminisce and laugh together like we’re back at Guilford.”

These days Paul shuffles from room to room and scribbles his doctors’ appointments on the pages of a tiny black notebook he carries with him. But as much as Paul knows his limitations, he is also aware of his obligations. He sees it almost as his duty to be an unapologetic champion of a liberal arts education, particularly one at Guilford.

Higher education – a liberal arts education in particular – is in the crosshairs of skeptical parents and politicians. This does not sit well with the professor. “We live in a materialistic and career-oriented world and colleges are responding to that demand,” he says. “I suppose it makes good business sense if I’m paying that kind of money to send my child to college.”

Yet in the next breath, Paul will tell you that students are not objects to be shaped and commodified and sent down a conveyor belt like so many widgets. Not at Guilford.

Any college can teach Accounting, he says. “It takes a liberal arts school like Guilford to teach a student how to think, how to evaluate, how to be an independent critic. Guilford gives you the knowledge not just to be an accountant but also trains your mind to think about the world and workplace and the problems inherent to both in a manner that can’t be learned from a textbook. That still means something.”

A need to connect

Paul and Evelyn moved to Greensboro in 1959, lured by the opportunity to teach (not lecture) students. It helped that only a few years earlier Paul, the son of German Baptists, and Evelyn, whose parents were southern Baptists, began exploring Quakerism after they met at the University of Florida.

They became convinced Quakers and joined the New Garden Friends Meeting shortly after settling in at Guilford. “Their Peace Testimony, their position on race and ethnicity, it all made perfect sense to us,” says Paul.

He has been a faithful member ever since – even more so after Evelyn died eight years ago and the pandemic that followed. At a time when the world was asked to keep six feet apart, Paul realized the importance of staying close.

“I needed the nurturing of the other people who were Friends, and I needed that spiritual feeling as well,” he says. “Quakerism is founded on the notion that there is something of God in every person and I believe that. In my own way, I experience that, and it is most acutely experienced in me when I’m around others, not here by myself in this house.”

About that house: Karen says many female students came knocking in the 1960s and ‘70s and it wasn’t to hear Paul’s wisdom on America’s mortality patterns and trends.

“He was so cute and attractive,” she says.

“I don’t know how many hundreds of young women had secretly fallen in love with Paul in the classroom and gone over to the house to get a glimpse of Evelyn because they were convinced Paul could do better with them,” she says laughing. “They hosted so many parties and Evelyn was the perfect hostess. She knew how the students felt about Paul, but she also knew she didn’t have to worry. They were so in love.”

Evelyn died in 2016, following a series of strokes. A day doesn’t go by where Paul doesn’t think about her. There’s an oil painting of her in the living room over the fireplace. Evelyn is wearing a green dress with a hint of a smile, forever 29.

Paul says the artist’s smile does not do his Evelyn justice. “She laughed a lot, she smiled a lot, a big, infectious smile,” he says. Paul himself smiles, like a slice of watermelon. Except almost as soon as it appears, the smile is gone and Paul looks down.

“She was the best thing to ever happen to me,” he says.

Shortly after they married, Paul and Evelyn shared another vow: to live to 100. It was foolish, he says now, the kind of deal young lovers make with the luxury of time. But as the years and then decades went on they reminded each other of the pact. “We really meant it,” he says, “and for the longest time we thought we’d succeed.”

For the longest time, Paul didn’t want to go on without his best friend and partner, but then he thought about Evelyn and her smile, and her love for living. “She wouldn’t want me to vegetate in the corner until they came and dragged me out the front door,” he says. “The answer for me was clear. I decided to choose life. I've had eight years of good life and I want a few more.”

He says Guilford has a lot of life, too. Even now, at 93, Paul is willing to climb back into the ring for the College. “It’s not just me,” he says. “A lot of good people are fighting to make this College the best it can be. Guilfordians need to be right there beside us because this College is worth fighting for,” he says.

A garden is not the only thing that energizes Paul. “This College, my colleagues and my students had such an impact on me. “They made me a better person. All of us need to keep that going for future generations of Guilfordians.”

He wants to be here in May when another generation of Guilfordians graduate and head out to change their corner of the world. He wants to be here in August when another wave of Guilfiordians arrive on campus – perhaps in search of a professor like Paul – who will radically alter their lives. That’s why he keeps his medical appointments in that little black book. That’s why, per doctor’s orders, he walks all those laps around the inside of his home. That’s why he tends his garden.

The May garden is green and Paul knows it will soon be dressed in a technicolor of vegetables. Beets first, then tomatoes followed by squash. He loves his pebble-skinned, canary yellow crookneck summer squash, which he will sautee for dinner.

“It’s a lot of effort, but the payoff, the reward is well worth it,” he says. Is the old man talking about a garden or a college?

Does it matter?

Paul closes his eyes and smiles at what dreams may come.  “I can’t wait,” he says.