Excitement and dread

All day yesterday there was a kind of excitement in the air, palpable anticipation of a new fall semester as thousands of College of Charleston students and their parents streamed into the downtown campus to unload trunks, vans and U-hauls full of possessions into dorm rooms. When I went home from work for lunch, I got caught up in a traffic jam of college students. I saw heaps of boxes, stereos, small refrigerators, computers, clothes — stacks and stacks of STUFF all over the sidewalks. Anxious parents and their sons and daughters were preparing for short, or long and tearful, goodbyes. (The advice experts say make the parting quick and as unemotional as possible so the students remaining behind will feel less sad and forlorn). However, just as many as are frightened and apprehensive, many others are feeling perhaps a bit too liberatred, too soon, and only too happy to wave farewell to departing parents and usher in the longed-for freedom of COLLLEGE. At last!

Anyway, the merchants all over downtown, particularly the shopkeepers and restaurateurs up and down King Street, are now joyously heralding the return of the college youth with their appetites for beer and pizza and partying at the clubs and bars. It’s been a long and empty summer for many, although a certain amount of tourism business helps tide them over. Many people don’t realize it, but Charleston, though most famous for its historic houses, is also a college town. The CofC has 11,000 students and is located right smack in the heart of the city. Downtown is certainly alive with the comings and goings to students, faculty and staff. I go there a lot since it’s only a few blocks from where I work. I feel the youthful energy, the aliveness, the excitement that a college campus always stirs in me. The intellectual ferment. The prime of life for so many. To be young again??

I can look at this annual return to campus after the summer break with the perspective of time and distance, and thankfully a bit of wistfulnes now, for my own college beginnings were anything but a happy or exciting times. Intensely serious, desperately ready to leave New Orleans far behind and make my way in the world, I chose my school badly — a small campus out from a large city, cut off from every shred of familiar life I had known. I hadn’t visited the campus before. I just thought it was the right college. The experience turned out to be so bad, that even today I hate to even say the name of the school, or write it out.

The long trip by car with my parents from New Orleans was passed in a sort of foreboding daze as I lay in the back seat of the car, waves of anxiety rolling over me. The sunny blue skies of that hot, late August afternoon were as nothing to me. The car might just as well have been a bullet passing through the dead of night. I sensed nothing. I was numb. Numb from the fear that I had made a terrible mistake. When I arrived on campus, I knew it. It was immediately made known that hazing of freshmen by sophomores was still tolerated, and that it would begin after only a very slight grace period. I had a yellow steamer trunk that held all my clothes and belonging. Not a lot really. My roommate was a basketball player from Indiana with whom I had nothing in common. In fact, I think in the whole of the first semester we spoke about 10 sentences. He was gone a lot, and I had the room to myself to brood and try to figure out how I had arrived in such a place. I even tried smoking a pipe! It calmed. Cigarettes were still too taboo for me. When my roommate was there, the sounds of the early Bee Gees drifted continuously from his stereo. I think it was the only record he had.

Suffice it to say, and despite what you think about fate and ultimate benevolence, I was not meant to be there, and subsequently drifted off into periods of depression and isolation that made me crawl into some deep hole within myself. I tried to meet people, and I tried to like the place, but never once was there a ray of light during that awful semester. It was as if the proverbial black cloud hung over me the entire time. And it wasn’t as if I could magically erase that black aura. The dean advised me to buckle down and study harder, although I was spending most of my time studying. In a basement study hall. Hours on end. To escape being outside in that place I dreaded. Barely comprehending through the fog of that dark time.

So I left as soon as the semester was over and never looked back. Never even wanted to go to that city again, as much as I have come to love South Carolina.

I always like to say that if I had found a school like the College of Charleston, I would have found my match and been happy. But that is somewhat fanciful, retro thinking. I came home in a bit of disgrace, the perfect student in high school suffering the humiliation of defeat. I picked the pieces up and started all over again. And I succeeded. And I learned a lesson. I was not ready to leave the familiarity and comfort zones of home and New Orleans as much as I despised so much of that city, and despite the fact that I had every reason to want to go far away. That time would not come again for four more years, and when it did, after an intial period of struggle and indecision, everything came together, again in South Carolilna, and life opened for me in ways wondrous and unpredictable. My highest expectations for living life fully for the first time were realized in those first few unforgettable years after I had graduated from college and I was on my own. I was ready. How I wish it has lasted.