The Title of the Blog - Part 8

In which our hero finds that a column has aged well...

I like how this one reads and how it speaks to the fact that we're never mature but rather are maturing and how Wabash helped me along that path.

College takes a toll on us all. We spend eighteen years creating ourselves, craving a niche form our family and from our friends. We chip away the baby fat, shed the oily, pimply skin of junior high, and peel off the high school letterman jacket, leaving ourselves one layer closer to the truth each time as we go along.

Then one day this gangly, ungainly, self-conscious boy steps from his shell knowing that he is a man. Some of us had been kissed, some deflowered, some still pure when this happened, but damn it, we were men then. We had progressed as far as home could lead us, as far as we could grow under a roof that was not ours. At that point we were as manly as we could ever be. Each of us knew that. We were wrong.

And then we left the relative safety nest. Sure of ourselves and confident that we could handle anything that the world could dish out. We had sent away letters and checks, but now we packed something more. We surrounded ourselves with an armor of suitcases and duffel bags, dragged our every worldly belongings into trucks and cars and trailers, and set out.

I put in my yearbooks from New Albany High School because they contained the last four years of my life. They were signed by friends who I had grown to know and who I had actually let know me. They held pictures of the time when I had become what I knew then to be a man. And they let me hold on to a world that I knew would never be the same again.

I packed up my CD’s as well because I liked listening to them and because Wayne and I had been playing them on our high school radio show for a couple of years. Each time I listened to “Cecelia” by Simon and Garfunkle, I heard instead our voices singing along. Wayne was my best friend back then; he isn’t anymore.

When we left home, every one of us – me and my friends, you and yours – put in the things that we thought we could never live without. The picture of us celebrating when our high school won sectionals went into a book to be taken out once we got wherever we were going. The t-shirt we made in high school shop class went to, because it was a reminder of where we came from. And some of us even brought things from further back, things to help us remember times before we weren’t men. No matter what it was, for us Wallies, it found its way into our first room here in Crawfordsville.

For some of us that was in a fraternity, and for others it was in a dormitory. Either way, once we got here and unpacked we set out looking for people with whom we would spend our first dinner, our first weekend, and our first year. Some of the people in this group came from our freshman tutorial and some from our hallway or pledge classes. But I would wager that many of them do not still eat dinner with us on a daily basis.

After the new crowd was found, we settled into a routine of classes and weekends, binges and purges. I know for myself Wabash also meant a routine of long talks with new friends, sitting up into the wee hours chatting about home-sickness, women, and some rather weighty subjects. For other men the first year at Wabash means a first taste of freedom, of unsupervised drinking and partying, of sex and freedom. Some of us handle our first taste, and some do not. The former group ends up stronger for experimenting and for seeing what there is to see. Part of the latter group is no longer with us for various reasons: scholarships revoked, transfers made, money lost, and some even for lives taken by their own hand. But a bigger part of that group that could not handle the initial cutting of apron strings is still with us. They simply bear the scars.

Last Sunday night the Lambda Chi house voted on who to initiate as new brothers. We didn’t have to vote on three freshman because they didn’t make grades. Those three will bear some scars. One of the brothers in the house had to give up an office because his grades slipped a bit this past semester. These four are not to be singled out, however, because elsewhere at this college men are constantly slipping a bit, losing their ways from whatever path they hoped to follow. I know friends with drinking problems and others who had to leave us but who hope to come back. These people are paying the toll that college – and life – exacts.

But these men will likely make it. They will survive and hopefully will be stronger for what they have been through. They will be helped along by friends and by professors, will manage somehow see their ways to the other side of their problems, and will come out much stronger. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

That’s pretty much how I look at my time here at Wabash. I came here as a man – at least as something that I then thought was a man. I joined a fraternity and met a few real men, men whom I respect to this day. I traveled a bit, learned some facts, and most importantly shed a few more layers, leaving me a little closer to who I really am.

Today those yearbooks don’t sit on the shelves in my room because they are not who I am; they are who I was. Instead, they’ve been replaced with different books, including one from one of the Midwest’s finest authors Garrison Keillor. In it, I found a quote that I thought I’d leave you folks with. Thanks for listening by the way…

“I need to know something more miraculous than that, the secret of happiness. What, as a child, I thought Christmas would give or college or show business, and, as a youth, I though sex would give, now, as a man, I am still looking for. I though I’d find it in my writing but is only work, like auto repair except more professional.” - “Who do you think you are?” Garrison Keillor