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An old friend of mine, now a retired English professor sent me this story he wrote, with this year's Christmas card. It's based on a true event, and I'm in it. Read it through and ignore the numbers in parentheses, then if you are curious go back and look for those places I've marked, to hear the true story, at least as I remember it.
..........
On that gray afternoon in 1972, dried oak leaves swirled outside my dormitory window. That was normal(1), for the Ohio State campus was filled with trees, whose leaves had been falling and dancing in the wind for weeks. Today though, winter had arrived in good measure, with a howling gale that blew hummocks of leaves high in the air. Looking from my Smith Hall dorm into a mirror image of the same room in Steeb Hall, Smith's identical twin next door,(2) I had trouble remembering that I was on the top floor and the leaves were boiling twelve stories above ground.
Normally both buildings were full of freshmen who passed the night shouting obscene insults at each other, amused the sounds would echo back and forth between the artificial brick cliffs.(3) Now they had dispersed, all but a pitiful few, and the seedling Buckeyes were on their best behaviors back in their parents' homes. For it was Thanksgiving Day. Most of those left were graduate students like myself, four years older if not wiser, recruited form all over the nation for high-ranked Ph.D. programs Attracted by a seemingly generous first year stipend, most of us lacked the means to fly back to our homes for the holiday, especially if we'd committed to spending Christmas home in another month. So we wiled away the time, reading the articles in Playboy for recreation or stopping by the TV lounge on the ground floor to watch the parade or one of the traditional Thanksgiving football games.
My roommate rode a Trailways Bus back to his home in Michigan.(4) So I had the room all myself for the weekend, a dubious pleasure, I thought as twilight deepened. I started to think about dinner. The dorm's cafeteria was closed for the whole holiday weekend, but that was never anything to celebrate. I'd gotten a burger for lunch at one of the fast food places on High Street, and I figured I'd do much the same for supper.
There was a soft knock at the door, and CW(5) from the room next door peeked in. He too was spending the holiday by himself. "Wanna eat?" "Sure," I said. "How about the new hoagie joint?" "Works," he said in his laconic way. A grad student in Russian, he was sociable but a man of few words, who probably enjoyed spending time with a talkative English grad student like myself. (6) But a dash over to High Street would chill us to the bone, so we grabbed our thickest winter coats.
We didn't dash far before we saw trouble: in the deepening blue of nightfall the hoagie place was dark. It had closed early that night so emplyees could enjoy a long-anticipated turkey-and-dressing feast with their families. We jogged north on the campus's main drag, but it was the same story, block after block. "Closed at 3 PM for Thanksgiving." Even McDonald's. Even Cincinnati Chili, which was always open. (Their specialty was an infallible cure for hangovers.) (7)
The trek into the Arctic gale made us snuggle our arms as far into our coat pockets as they would go. Finally CW took one arm out and pointed at a blue light in a window two blocks ahead. "There!" he said. We broke into a hearty trot and soon came to a flashing open sign. It was a Domino's Pizza carryout. By this time our cold weather hike had made us settle for anything. We bellied up to the counter and each ordered as large a pizza as we felt we could eat, then loosened our coats in the steamy place, eagerly inhaling the yeasty fragrance to thaw us out.
Fifteen minutes later, our boxes were ready. We paid and looked for a table where we could eat it.
"Ya can't eat in here," the cashier said sullenly. This is take-out only."
"No joke," CW responded with a touch of surprise.
"But it's damn cold out there," I said. Can't we just sit on the floor and eat it?"
"Naw," the cashier said sullenly. "Health regulations. Ya gotta take it out." We stared for a moment and then her eyeborws lowered. With the habitual disdain reserved for troublesome college students, she simply said, "take it!" adding ominously, "Out!"(8)
So we took it out. Knowing that the icy temperature would make the toasty fresh piza stale and rubbery, we started out at a frantic hustle. Then both of us felt the bottom of the boxes we carrie get less and less toasty - first hot -then warm - then...
"Oh, hell," I said to CW. There's a city bus shelter up ahead. Let's eat it while it's still good." "You bet," he replied, and we bounded into the plastic haven huddling up to the side that provided a windbreak. Sloughing off our gloves, we opened the boxes and gobbled down the pizzas, slice after slice enjoying the parts that were still warm and moist and chewing the chilly parts until they gave up their flavors of cheese and oregano. It was the the quickest I'd ever eaten a whole pizza, and yet we both knew we'd gotten the good of that meal just barely in time.
Eating so fast warmed us up, and in fact gave us a bit of a high. Maybe it was the fat, maybe the carbs, maybe the secrat spice. But as we headed back down High Street, the icy wind now safely at our back, we started to fell slightly tipsy. to my surprise, the quiet and reserved CW began to sing, first softly, a martial tune I could not place at first. But when he saw no one else on the dark street but the random police car (who showed no interest in us), his voice grew louder and louder.
"When the bad plays the Tiger war song," I heard him sing, his heart gradually getting into the melody, building to the climax:
"And when the fray is through,
We will tramp, tramp, tramp around the Columns,
With a cheer for Ol' Mizzou!"
Some of his unwonted devilry brought out my wilder side, and I suddenly broke out with one of my favorite rowdy college songs:
"git out you ol' silver goblet
With Virginny written on it
An' we'll all have another round of beer!"
CW evidently knew a version sung by Missouri undergraduates, for he joined me when I got to
"Oh we all came to college
But we didn't come fer knowledge
An' we'll raise hell while we're here.
Still there was no response except for the clatter of one more flock of dried leaves as it scuttled around our backs. So we continued on to the traditional cheers, our words jumbling together as the wind blew them off our into the darkness:
WA-HOO-WA,
MIZZOU-RAH!
WA-HOO-WA!
MIZZOU-RAH!
UNI-V!
MIZZOU-RAH!
VIRGINEE-YAH!
TIGERS!
When we got back to our rooms atop Smith Hall, we considered that we had done the holiday up proud after all. A solitary undergrad on a top floor of Steeb cranked his window open and aiming his megaphone to our side, bellowed out his usual "Hey, Smith! You suck!" Any other night this would have started a raucous war of obscenities and firecrackers in the echoing space between the dorms. But tonight he got no answer, so he just called it quits early. "What's he doing over there?" I asked. "So his parents told him to not come home? CW looked back and simply said, "Sad." (9)
1. Dry leaves were anything but normal for that fall. It rained so much that fall, that when we had a dry day I honestly did not recognize the building I had had most of my classes in for a month and had to search around the front for building's name plaque! Could it have been dry with the leaves blowing everywhere that afternoon? Maybe, it certainly was windy!
2. Was it Smith Hall and then Steeb across the way? Heck, if I remember... He and I only lived there for a few months.
3. The noise was worst when somebody's girlfriend would get out in the grass between the buildings and start hollering to get the boyfriend to come out. When the freshmen guys in both dorms responded, there where echos a plenty. I was so glad to move elsewhere.
4. His roommate had gone to college at Indiana, Pennsylvania... Seriously... It was confusing.
5. CW are not my real initials. Changed from the real name he used. You know me as Cactus Watcher, so I'm so not trying to trick anybody. He was talking about me.
6. Yep, and it's rare to meet someone talkative who doesn't like talking to someone who rarely interrupts.
7. Don't ask how a grad student would know that. Actually I discovered that a good greasy hamburger after a night of imbibing, would keep me from getting a hangover at all. Cincinnati Chili is fine with or without being drunk.
8. In our defense, this exchange actually didn't happen. We weren't stupid enough to try to eat at a take-out only place... But, yes, it's safe to say we both wanted to. There was indeed a place that would regularly kick students out not far away. But if Domino's did it, it never happened to me. So, poetic license to the rescue! Much of what follows this conversation is pure fantasy.
9. The truth: we trotted back to the dorm with our pizza. After all, we could get something to drink there. The wind was indeed at our backs and it did not feel quite as cold. When we made it back to whichever room we ate in, the pizza was still tolerably warm. We were both starving and we did indeed eat it quickly... However, it was the greasiest pizza I ever had, and we both swore we'd never do that again! I don't know about my friend but I've never ordered a Domino's pizza since. Whatever we did that evening afterward was a big improvement, probably just talked. We never roomed together, but we spent several Thanksgivings together after that night, very much remembering what had happened that first Thanksgiving, in Columbus. But all the meals were much more pleasant.
If he ever heard me break into song it wasn't over that pizza. I didn't know and still don't know the words to that Missouri fight song, but if I had known and had sung it, he'd have undoubtedly recognized its familiar tune, the same as "It's a Long Way To Tipperary"
I didn't know the words to that drinking song he says he sang, but possibly I could have faked it. There's a guy on YouTube about our age singing it with Lehigh University in mind, if you want to look it up. I may well have joined him in some other drinking song at some point in our graduate lives. He and I knew several.
I could indeed have done the cheer, but I doubt I did it that night. I don't remember him doing the Virginia cheer either, but he certainly could have done it in my presence over the years.
I think it was a couple years later, he took up the five-string banjo and after seeing him having fun, I bought my first mandolin. We played for each other a time or two, but we weren't good enough to play together.
..........
On that gray afternoon in 1972, dried oak leaves swirled outside my dormitory window. That was normal(1), for the Ohio State campus was filled with trees, whose leaves had been falling and dancing in the wind for weeks. Today though, winter had arrived in good measure, with a howling gale that blew hummocks of leaves high in the air. Looking from my Smith Hall dorm into a mirror image of the same room in Steeb Hall, Smith's identical twin next door,(2) I had trouble remembering that I was on the top floor and the leaves were boiling twelve stories above ground.
Normally both buildings were full of freshmen who passed the night shouting obscene insults at each other, amused the sounds would echo back and forth between the artificial brick cliffs.(3) Now they had dispersed, all but a pitiful few, and the seedling Buckeyes were on their best behaviors back in their parents' homes. For it was Thanksgiving Day. Most of those left were graduate students like myself, four years older if not wiser, recruited form all over the nation for high-ranked Ph.D. programs Attracted by a seemingly generous first year stipend, most of us lacked the means to fly back to our homes for the holiday, especially if we'd committed to spending Christmas home in another month. So we wiled away the time, reading the articles in Playboy for recreation or stopping by the TV lounge on the ground floor to watch the parade or one of the traditional Thanksgiving football games.
My roommate rode a Trailways Bus back to his home in Michigan.(4) So I had the room all myself for the weekend, a dubious pleasure, I thought as twilight deepened. I started to think about dinner. The dorm's cafeteria was closed for the whole holiday weekend, but that was never anything to celebrate. I'd gotten a burger for lunch at one of the fast food places on High Street, and I figured I'd do much the same for supper.
There was a soft knock at the door, and CW(5) from the room next door peeked in. He too was spending the holiday by himself. "Wanna eat?" "Sure," I said. "How about the new hoagie joint?" "Works," he said in his laconic way. A grad student in Russian, he was sociable but a man of few words, who probably enjoyed spending time with a talkative English grad student like myself. (6) But a dash over to High Street would chill us to the bone, so we grabbed our thickest winter coats.
We didn't dash far before we saw trouble: in the deepening blue of nightfall the hoagie place was dark. It had closed early that night so emplyees could enjoy a long-anticipated turkey-and-dressing feast with their families. We jogged north on the campus's main drag, but it was the same story, block after block. "Closed at 3 PM for Thanksgiving." Even McDonald's. Even Cincinnati Chili, which was always open. (Their specialty was an infallible cure for hangovers.) (7)
The trek into the Arctic gale made us snuggle our arms as far into our coat pockets as they would go. Finally CW took one arm out and pointed at a blue light in a window two blocks ahead. "There!" he said. We broke into a hearty trot and soon came to a flashing open sign. It was a Domino's Pizza carryout. By this time our cold weather hike had made us settle for anything. We bellied up to the counter and each ordered as large a pizza as we felt we could eat, then loosened our coats in the steamy place, eagerly inhaling the yeasty fragrance to thaw us out.
Fifteen minutes later, our boxes were ready. We paid and looked for a table where we could eat it.
"Ya can't eat in here," the cashier said sullenly. This is take-out only."
"No joke," CW responded with a touch of surprise.
"But it's damn cold out there," I said. Can't we just sit on the floor and eat it?"
"Naw," the cashier said sullenly. "Health regulations. Ya gotta take it out." We stared for a moment and then her eyeborws lowered. With the habitual disdain reserved for troublesome college students, she simply said, "take it!" adding ominously, "Out!"(8)
So we took it out. Knowing that the icy temperature would make the toasty fresh piza stale and rubbery, we started out at a frantic hustle. Then both of us felt the bottom of the boxes we carrie get less and less toasty - first hot -then warm - then...
"Oh, hell," I said to CW. There's a city bus shelter up ahead. Let's eat it while it's still good." "You bet," he replied, and we bounded into the plastic haven huddling up to the side that provided a windbreak. Sloughing off our gloves, we opened the boxes and gobbled down the pizzas, slice after slice enjoying the parts that were still warm and moist and chewing the chilly parts until they gave up their flavors of cheese and oregano. It was the the quickest I'd ever eaten a whole pizza, and yet we both knew we'd gotten the good of that meal just barely in time.
Eating so fast warmed us up, and in fact gave us a bit of a high. Maybe it was the fat, maybe the carbs, maybe the secrat spice. But as we headed back down High Street, the icy wind now safely at our back, we started to fell slightly tipsy. to my surprise, the quiet and reserved CW began to sing, first softly, a martial tune I could not place at first. But when he saw no one else on the dark street but the random police car (who showed no interest in us), his voice grew louder and louder.
"When the bad plays the Tiger war song," I heard him sing, his heart gradually getting into the melody, building to the climax:
"And when the fray is through,
We will tramp, tramp, tramp around the Columns,
With a cheer for Ol' Mizzou!"
Some of his unwonted devilry brought out my wilder side, and I suddenly broke out with one of my favorite rowdy college songs:
"git out you ol' silver goblet
With Virginny written on it
An' we'll all have another round of beer!"
CW evidently knew a version sung by Missouri undergraduates, for he joined me when I got to
"Oh we all came to college
But we didn't come fer knowledge
An' we'll raise hell while we're here.
Still there was no response except for the clatter of one more flock of dried leaves as it scuttled around our backs. So we continued on to the traditional cheers, our words jumbling together as the wind blew them off our into the darkness:
WA-HOO-WA,
MIZZOU-RAH!
WA-HOO-WA!
MIZZOU-RAH!
UNI-V!
MIZZOU-RAH!
VIRGINEE-YAH!
TIGERS!
When we got back to our rooms atop Smith Hall, we considered that we had done the holiday up proud after all. A solitary undergrad on a top floor of Steeb cranked his window open and aiming his megaphone to our side, bellowed out his usual "Hey, Smith! You suck!" Any other night this would have started a raucous war of obscenities and firecrackers in the echoing space between the dorms. But tonight he got no answer, so he just called it quits early. "What's he doing over there?" I asked. "So his parents told him to not come home? CW looked back and simply said, "Sad." (9)
1. Dry leaves were anything but normal for that fall. It rained so much that fall, that when we had a dry day I honestly did not recognize the building I had had most of my classes in for a month and had to search around the front for building's name plaque! Could it have been dry with the leaves blowing everywhere that afternoon? Maybe, it certainly was windy!
2. Was it Smith Hall and then Steeb across the way? Heck, if I remember... He and I only lived there for a few months.
3. The noise was worst when somebody's girlfriend would get out in the grass between the buildings and start hollering to get the boyfriend to come out. When the freshmen guys in both dorms responded, there where echos a plenty. I was so glad to move elsewhere.
4. His roommate had gone to college at Indiana, Pennsylvania... Seriously... It was confusing.
5. CW are not my real initials. Changed from the real name he used. You know me as Cactus Watcher, so I'm so not trying to trick anybody. He was talking about me.
6. Yep, and it's rare to meet someone talkative who doesn't like talking to someone who rarely interrupts.
7. Don't ask how a grad student would know that. Actually I discovered that a good greasy hamburger after a night of imbibing, would keep me from getting a hangover at all. Cincinnati Chili is fine with or without being drunk.
8. In our defense, this exchange actually didn't happen. We weren't stupid enough to try to eat at a take-out only place... But, yes, it's safe to say we both wanted to. There was indeed a place that would regularly kick students out not far away. But if Domino's did it, it never happened to me. So, poetic license to the rescue! Much of what follows this conversation is pure fantasy.
9. The truth: we trotted back to the dorm with our pizza. After all, we could get something to drink there. The wind was indeed at our backs and it did not feel quite as cold. When we made it back to whichever room we ate in, the pizza was still tolerably warm. We were both starving and we did indeed eat it quickly... However, it was the greasiest pizza I ever had, and we both swore we'd never do that again! I don't know about my friend but I've never ordered a Domino's pizza since. Whatever we did that evening afterward was a big improvement, probably just talked. We never roomed together, but we spent several Thanksgivings together after that night, very much remembering what had happened that first Thanksgiving, in Columbus. But all the meals were much more pleasant.
If he ever heard me break into song it wasn't over that pizza. I didn't know and still don't know the words to that Missouri fight song, but if I had known and had sung it, he'd have undoubtedly recognized its familiar tune, the same as "It's a Long Way To Tipperary"
I didn't know the words to that drinking song he says he sang, but possibly I could have faked it. There's a guy on YouTube about our age singing it with Lehigh University in mind, if you want to look it up. I may well have joined him in some other drinking song at some point in our graduate lives. He and I knew several.
I could indeed have done the cheer, but I doubt I did it that night. I don't remember him doing the Virginia cheer either, but he certainly could have done it in my presence over the years.
I think it was a couple years later, he took up the five-string banjo and after seeing him having fun, I bought my first mandolin. We played for each other a time or two, but we weren't good enough to play together.