Originally posted by Alan Bowers on April 24, 2014 at economyinmotion.com.
Let us now praise famous men, three of them: F. M. Alexander, the discoverer of the Alexander Technique, his follower Patrick Macdonald, and Albert Lee Bowers. Now, that last man, Mr. Allie, as his friends called him, just who is he? A sharecropper, a grocery store clerk, my paternal grandfather, and the man whom, if I arrived in heaven, I’d like to meet first. (That’s he behind the plow in his Tennessee strawberry field.) Mr. Allie, after whom I’m named, had a defining gesture that I see in my mind’s eye right now, and occasionally in the movement of my own hands. He had a way of nodding with his hand, his elbow bent loosely at his side, his palm turned inward, his wrist free, and his hand in motion, up and down, a lateral wave. If Mr. Allie was doing this he was saying something that mattered. But I was an ignorant kid and seldom got it. But what I do remember are his hands, semaphores of goodness, beautiful hands, though he would deny it.