All So Very Small

I know this drive even though I haven’t done it in nearly thirty years.  I can see the big African American cop with his wide brim hat pointing at me to pull over, only miles after entering the Connecticut boarder.  Me?  Shit.  I remember nodding off on my way into Waterford and nearly sailing off the overpass down into the city one morning, returning this way early in the morning.  But I didn’t remember the cliffs there that you see thee as you approach Middletown.  The Red Dog Saloon is still there, surviving as the anti-Wesleyan biker bar on the ride over the hills from Meriden and down into Middletown. 

I take my daughter into the campus, a right, on College Avenue.  Then another turn and we’re up on Foss Hill looking first, as we park the car down towards the dorm where I was first a student when my parents probably parked right here and unloaded my stuff and wished me well, thirty three years ago.  There’s the room that I shared with the person who was to become a best friend for life.  Turning one hundred and eighty degrees I see West College, where “everyone” who wasn’t in our dorm lived.  I had forgotten that we had to pass a graveyard to get there. 

Driving, my daughter had read to me from “War and Peace.”  We’ve been reading it forever.  It takes a while.  She read to me from the section where Rostov’s men are our eating wild herbs to sustain themselves.  This makes them sick.  He decides to secure some food for them by exceptional means and it is clear, in the way that only Tolstoy can make all perfectly clear ahead of time, that he will pay for his.  And there is Foss Hill, down on to the campus below.  I remember sitting on that hill and reading “War and Peace” for myself my Freshman year, churning through hundreds of pages, sitting there my first fall season at this university.  Looking around I didn’t expect to feel this but I do:  It is all so very small.  How did this little place constitute a world for all those years?  I’m not sure.  But it did. 

My daughter likes It’s Only Natural.  Like I had been when I first visited this school, she is a vegetarian. The restaurant has some radically inclusive literature, lying around for perusal, which I bring over to the table and, as expected, this all catches her attention.  The food is notably not about mock meat dishes and rather what one can do with pure vegan ingredients.  We both comment on this and we both note how great the food is.  I tell the waiter I haven’t been here in twenty-eight years.  He takes this in and mentions that he is twenty-eight years old.

Tuesday, 07/18/17