Oh teachers are my lessons done?
I cannot do another one.
They laughed and laughed and said,
Well child, are your lessons done?
–Leonard Cohen
The summer before entering Dartmouth College my class was sent books to read in advance of our matriculation. One was by José Ortega y Gasset, the other I don’t remember. I do remember that I didn’t read either one so the lecture about them upon our arrival in Hanover was wasted on me.
Quickly though, I discovered that Dartmouth was not a place where I could blow through assignments and skate by. My professors were demanding and my classmates smart and during my four years I remember only one student who I felt didn’t have the brains to be there.
Maybe I’m being harsh about him but it was after midnight night in rural Virginia when he bridged a car in which I was a passenger on a railroad track. Missing the turn was forgivable and fortunately, there was a bar adjacent to our predicament and its customers streamed out to help lift our vehicle back on the road we had strayed from.
As we got back in the car the good and drunk samaritans started banging on the hood demanding money.
“What should I do?” asked our driver. “I can’t run over them.”
“No, but you can back the fuck up and get the hell out of here!”
I’m not sure I was the first to shout this but you get the picture.
That close call occurred during the spring of my sophomore year. I was on the golf team and we were on our spring trip having worked our way north from South Carolina. A place called Fripp Island had been our starting point. It was a newly completed golf course and had all the hazards you tried to avoid and an extra one that seemed more like a matter of life and death.
In addition to the usual sand traps and ponds there were alligators and our rounds took longer to complete since when we spotted a gator on the fairway none of us knew how to ask it to let us play through.
The final match of our tour was at the University of Maryland. I was playing as last man on our team but I ended up paired against Maryland’s best golfer who was being punished for showing up late. He was mad about that and in golf, unlike football, anger is not usually going to work to your advantage.
I had a great day. The Maryland number one had a bad one and I beat him. That night my teammates and I celebrated and I vaguely remember at one point making a hazy trip to the men’s room.
When I arrived back in Hanover I was faced with a decision I had to make. In order to enroll in the fall I needed to declare a major. I had considered sociology but a baffling encounter with a department professor who assigned us Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to read squelched that idea.
It was a Tuesday when she announced that we were supposed to have it read by Friday– all 458 pages. I approached her after class.
“Professor, I’m not sure I can read the book that fast.”
“Look, let me tell you something,” she said. “Most people only have one idea they’re trying to get across. If they’re great they might have two and if they have three they get the Nobel Prize.”
She was out the door while finishing her last sentence and I decided that I’d explore a different subject for a major.
And so it was shortly after our return from the golf trip that I walked across the Dartmouth Green to the English Department offices. The afternoon tea at Sanborn House was for prospective English majors and I had put on a jacket and tie for the occasion that I presumed was expected if not required. If I had been holding my tea cup and saucer correctly, I might have avoided what happened next.
As I listened and nodded while circulating around the room in front of the nattily dressed professors of the department I soon became aware that none were making consistent eye contact with me. They were more focused on the center of my chest. As soon as I lowered my head to see why, I understood the attraction. It was my tie– The same tie I had worn into the men’s room the night after my big win on the golf course.
Puke does not exactly enhance a repp tie and in seconds I concluded that English was not going to be the best choice for my concentration of studies either during the next two years.
When we returned to school that fall I still hadn’t made up my mind about a major. History seemed an option and I went to the bookstore to see what courses I would be signing up for but while checking them out I saw a class on Africa that was being taught by a government professor who I had liked… Yep, in that instant I became a government major.
After graduation when I went looking for my first job I was asked by an interviewer what I had studied in college. I told him the story I’ve just related here, vomit stained tie and all… He almost hired me!
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