Some things I know about college that I didn’t know when I was a freshman

Each term has a rhythm, rising and falling. During the term is a sense of timelessness. The term begins with excitement. It ends abruptly, and then the people are gone. Spring term starts well, with holidays finally over and work welcome. It gets very long. Many people get depressed. There will be students in my office in tears. The absence of light will contribute to this, and northern Minnesota winters can have many consecutive, overcast, short days.

More students will miss more classes. Spring break will be a psychologically necessary relief.

There will be one or two weeks of relatively warm weather at the end of the school year. Shorts and miniskirts will reappear. Men will take off their shirts while vigorously pursuing frisbees on the campus lawns. Then everyone but employees will be gone.

Even with the depression, the time spent doing, between time spent starting and ending, will be the best time.

People will forget color.

The third year is the best year. By then people are school savy and have a chance to really savor the experience without yet worrying about the complications and consequences of graduation.

Relationships get solid.

The fourth or fifth–anyway, the final–year is more tense, both with anxiety about leaving and with growing desire to move on. By the time people graduate it is time people graduate.

For most, that is the end of their connection with the school other than the alumni publications that will follow them if the alumni office can keep a current address.

Five years later people won’t remember much about their first year. Ten years later they will remember three or four of their teachers, but not much about them. They will be more likely to remember teachers for personal qualities than for teaching.

This is what I watch. Isn’t it strange that experience that sounds so bleak is so rich.

Life since blog

The term got really busy. Like, really.

Over Thanksgiving my mother and I went to my sister’s house in Chisago City. There we joined my brother’s two wives (sounds kinky, huh?) and the two children he had with the first wife and their spouses and children, including a four month old baby and a five month old baby that I had never met before. They, with sibling seven, four, and three year olds, made for a fest of children. I enjoyed thoroughly. My nephew’s friends from the area came over, as he was up from Florida, and I got re-acquainted with them, too. Mom continued her tradition of feeding everybody in highly satisfactory ways. Turkey, dressing, etc. Fish, salads, etc. Egg messes, desserts, etc. Lots of etc. Wine, too.

The night before she and I left we hosted a master class of those who are learning operatic singing from my teacher. He came and we sang and he did example lessons and we learned. Then Mom fed all of them. Lamb. Wild rice. Beans. Etc. Some wine went down, too. Etc.

Then back and start work yesterday. Eight a.m. until 9:30 p.m. One half hour for supper. Usual Monday.

Today at 1:30 in the afternoon I finally have half an hour that isn’t devoted to papers, travel, paper, rehearsal, paper, etc. Really tired of etc.

Going to go catch up on Loralee, Kurt, Laumei, Jessie, Laura, Alexis…probably etc, too.

Flashback

On Halloween evening after a first rehearsal for a new-to-me play, I was in a bar with one of my students and her girlfriend. The student is doing the play as her senior project for a theatre major. She asked me to “star” as the male lead.

I’d planned to go to that bar after the rehearsal to look at the Halloween costumes, which I did. One of my friends was there, so we were chatting when the two young women came in. Soon we were all talking.

My student suggested that she’d like to set me up with her girlfriend’s mother. To my dismay, I blushed. She thought that was hysterical. My friend said “Go for it.” Suddenly I was seeing a scene of another bar in another town on a Halloween night thirty years before.

My brother was standing at the bar next to me. Young women were clustered around him, two of them pushing between the two of us and turning their backs to me so they could direct full attention toward him. He was loving it.

A couple of times he interrupted them to re-direct their attention toward me–once to introduce me, which they politely acknowledged and then turned back toward him, and the other time to get them to guess which of us was the older. All five were sure I was the older. He was seven years older.

Big brother Norm had sex appeal. I didn’t. It radiated out of him all of his short life. He drew women. Even old women were interested.

My student didn’t know, when she saw me blush, that I was re-living an old conscious realization of being the man of little sexual interest when compared to my younger-seeming older brother, a brother who has been dead for twenty years.

Mine was a loaded blush.

Losing

I once wrote a poem about a comb. It was a comb I had bought from Old Man Cross of the Cross Barber Shop in Superior, Wisconsin in 1966, when I was in 7th grade. His shop was not far from the junior high school I attended. I remember that the school was a seventeen block walk from home and the barber shop was three blocks from the school, Old Man Cross had white hair, and I was happy to go to a man’s outpost, even though I was only about five feet tall and hadn’t gone through puberty yet. There men talked of men’s matters, which I didn’t know much about, and I had a dime to make a man’s purchase in a man’s setting.

I carried that comb in my back pocket for over thirty years. It gradually assumed a curve that conformed to the contour of my right rear cheek, and also gradually lost tines (“tines” rather than “teeth”–teeth that near a cheek is too much to bear). I wrote of the curve, and compared the gaps in the comb, developed over all those years, to the gaps in my hair developed over all those years. That ten cent comb had a manly significance.

And then one day it was gone. Not in yesterday’s pants pocket one morning. Never seen again.

I’ve had and lost several combs since then. The current one has been with me long enough to begin to assume the shape, but hasn’t lost tines yet, and I don’t much care whether I lose it. It doesn’t tell me anything other than I’m prepared to comb what hair I have left–and now the beard I didn’t and couldn’t have had when I bought the Cross comb, a beard now going gray, approaching the color of the old man’s hair.

I’m used to man things now. I’ve been one for a long time. Still, in a way I miss that comb and the youthful wonder I brought to a men’s barbershop all those years ago, before I knew that being a man really meant not anything mysterious but rather meant losing. Being a man means losing things, losing hair, losing youth, and being a man about it.

I’ve lost the poem, too.