A moving day

A moving day
by David Benjamin

“Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened… ”
— T.S. Eliot

MADISON, Wis. — I’m sometimes subject to a wave of nostalgia. I got hit by one the other day and almost drove onto the median and into a bush. The trigger was a sign outside a University of Wisconsin dorm directing students to where they could “move in.”

You see, there are very few moments in life to which anyone can point and say, “That — that! — was a day that changed everything.” For example, the day I graduated from high school — or any of my other graduation days — wasn’t such a day. It seemed to alter nothing in my life’s cycle, psyche or trajectory.

The only memories that stick clearly about that underwhelming milestone were the brief, belated crush I developed for my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Arnold and the cynical finality that my best friend, Dick Albright, uttered as we fled the gym after Commencement. “Well,” Dick said, as though dismissing me forever from his acquaintance, “have a good life.”

Indeed, most of the kids with whom I spent those four years dissolved from my world — some to school, most to thankless jobs, a few to the most thankless fate of all, in Vietnam.

Not Dick. We were bonded then and, though a thousand miles apart, still are. Other high-school friends went unchanged all that summer. We frequented the stores on State Street, still had ice cream at Bancroft’s Dairy and we got our burgers, whenever possible, from Tom Drengson — who cheated Ray Kroc extravagantly when making change for his classmates — at the McDonald’s on East Washington Avenue. My job at the Waunakee Canning Company, cooking peas and husking corn, was just like the summer before. I slept in the same bed, battled my big sister and kid brother in the same house on Simpson Street with my mom and her alcoholic boyfriend — with whom I battled even more fiercely.

My moment didn’t come ’til “moving in” at a small college in northern Illinois, where Mom dropped me and I told her to hit the road. Immediately, nothing was the same. I was a rank stranger, especially to myself. I didn’t even look like me. I had a neat new haircut. I’d spent my cannery earnings on clothes the like of which I’d never worn. After unpacking in Caster Hall (I still have my Caster Raiders sweatshirt), across from a roommate who was not my brother Bill and was not even white like Bill, I walked to freshman orientation in a pair of crisply pleated corduroy slacks and an earth-tone plaid flannel shirt with a button-down collar — tucked into my pants — clean socks and penny loafers.

Yeah. Penny loafers. Like I was Ryan O’Neal at Harvard.

Crossing an emerald lawn under azure skies, I was carrying the three books I’d been told to read before reporting, Demian by Hermann Hesse, The Medium Is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan’s comic-book companion to Understanding Media (the book I should have read), and The Harrad Experiment, Robert H. Rimmer’s creepy campus-sex fantasy.

I followed the signs to a lecture hall, where a crowd of more than a hundred freshman had all — every one — dutifully read their Demian, their Massage and their Harrad. I’d never before encountered an entire room full of teenagers who’d all done their homework.

And they wanted to talk about it, even Rimmer’s horndog utopia.

This was all new. Everything had changed for me, permanently. I could feel it. There was a tingle of fear, along with the thrill of the new and a pang of curiosity — about all these fresh, unfamiliar faces, who all had names because the college minions had slapped tags on us at the entrance.

Conspicuously absent from this demographic was the proud, stubborn ignorance that had been a badge of honor for so many of my fellow public high school inmates. No hoods, no jocks, no Dixie Peach greasers, no sullen girls with big hair and nicotine breath. Everyone here thought he or she was smart. Their presence here, at college, proved it, no? Nobody was going to rag me or slug me because I was carrying a book. Three books, actually.

This freshman crowd was a third the size of my high-school class. Without much effort, I could get to know every classmate before I finished here, if I stayed (which I didn’t). One of my first was a girl from Connecticut, whose named evoked Clara Bow, who said she chose this school over Yukon. To which I said, “Yeah, that would be cold!”

This was different. I could feel the ground shifting beneath my feet, forever. I had ridden up the metaphorical elevator to a floor where everyone knew what a metaphor is. I could go back down, but only at the risk of being dogged for the rest of my life by disappointment, by promise unfulfilled, by magic words unlearned, by friends and loved ones who would never care — and would seem vaguely uncomfortable — about how smart I am… or could have been.

Here were great expectations. Here was “a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity, in the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” I could feel it. It was exciting, confusing and possibly fatal. I could fail here.

For a moment, I knew I would fail, a disgrace to my family, a flunked-out draftee on a plane to Tan Son Nhut.

Ah, but this didn’t hold. I was swept into a whirl of dizzying acquaintance. Before the first day was done, there was Bruce, playing the guitar, singing the blues. I still buy his records and send him Christmas cards. My black roommate, Elliot, terse and enigmatic, introduced me to one of the great loves of my life, Jimmy Smith — and to Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins. And Elliot was gone, with all that music, after a semester. As time went by, I met my three sidekicks there, Jody and Mackie and D.P. Dagnes. A beautiful girl named Kendra — who came and went, who turned me down in favor of a series of salivating seniors — knit me a wool necklace, which I wore ’til it rotted away and was replaced by another, knit by a girl named Betsy, less beautiful but more true.

My boss in the college kitchen, where I earned my tuition, joked about the thing around my neck and called me Ben G. String, a lame joke that bonded us. By then, I was back in jeans and sneakers, better for swabbing the kitchen floors and slinging mystery meat on the food line.

My penny loafers gathered dust. I did my clothes shopping at Goodwill in Rockford. Dagnes had a car.

I started doing things I’d never done — never been asked, or allowed to do — before. A coach invited me to the cross-country team, a dubious enterprise whose highlight was a breathtaking last-place sprint in Gompers Park. But I got better, and ended up surprised by the only varsity letter of my life.

The biggest surprise was when the others — Bruce, Mackie, Clara Bow, all of ’em — elected me class president. Unthinkable in high school.

And life-altering proof that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.