Half a Lifetime Ago

The campus resonates with activity, oddly alive for a Saturday, especially now that the football season is over. Students’ thoughts focus on upcoming exams and final papers. Study groups meet on the benches in the quad and in the grass of the parade grounds to enjoy the last warm, dry days of November. Sweaters and sweatshirts wait in heaps on the ground or on laps, the only hints of the cooler mornings and evenings of late fall.

A young sophomore spends an afternoon under bright fluorescent lights on the floor of the university bookstore, confidently skimming the pages of fine print and diagrams from a psychology textbook she was unable to afford at the beginning of the semester and quickly jots notes into a worn, spiral bound notebook. She’d rather be at the typewriter working on her Heart is a Lonely Hunter paper or her paper on religious images in 19th century poetry. And she really should finish her last short story of her creative writing class but these she saves until the end, fine morsels of pleasure to punctuate the semester and savor until the next semester begins.

Architecture students, in their final year of studio, work and play on the first floor of Atkinson Hall at the opposite end of the quad from the library. An odd assortment of music wafts from the open casement windows that includes the Cranberries and Billy Joel and the students take turns singing along and tossing a ball over drafting tables as the others bend over drawings of buildings that will never be built. Colored renderings are stacked with elevations and section drawings ready to be presented to a skeptical panel of professors during the week of final exams. All energy and ease, one of the students takes leave of his friends and finds his way down the hall to the door. He walks quickly through the sculpture garden, beyond the dairy store and the classroom building to the stadium parking lot and his car.

The young woman smelled the strong sweet smell of her Milton professor’s pipe before seeing him standing in the shadows of the arched entrance of Allen Hall. He greets her through clenched teeth and then takes the pipe from his mouth to encourage her to finish reading the Milton prose because they will end discussions of Paradise Lost on Monday. She leans toward him to filter his quiet voice from the ambient noise around them and notices that she towers over him, this iconic image of professors of old, and wonders if the rumors that this is his last semester are true. They part ways and her thoughts return to the upcoming date that evening.

He arrives to her quiet apartment (her roommates both in New Orleans for the weekend) in a festive green and red plaid button down shirt and a pair of khakis. All chivalry and charm he puts her at ease before they are seated at a small table in DiGiulio Brothers, a cozy Italian restaurant down Perkins Road under an interstate overpass. He leads her to the table with his hand pressed against the small of her back and she feels his electricity through the black sweater and lace camisole long after his hand is released.

All smiles, they feed tidbits of themselves to each other over manicotti and wine. Guarded fantasies of a future beyond university life follow brief histories of their own young lives. One describes childhood haunts, places where this or that happened while the other embellishes childhood escapades. Overwhelming tales about growing up with five siblings intermingle with stories about life with one brother. A celebrated architect and acclaimed writer seem more like possibilities than whimsy. The escalated pleas of the woman behind them begging the man she is with to leave his wife result in the only lull in the young couple’s conversation. They linger at the table even when the food and the entertaining couple are gone. And linger on into a lifetime.

This November celebrates my life in halves. Half of a lifetime ago the two of us sat together for the first time in that crowded cafe. And now Craig has been a part of my life for as many years that I so quickly summed up on that first date.