Then and Now

I slumped on a comfortable coach in the library at Alma College yesterday; observing one student tap on his laptop, another flip through a thick reference book, while I scanned framed posters of guest poets who gave readings in the last year’s poetry series.   50 years ago I tiptoed through mud or balanced on hastily thrown plywood planks set up over icy puddles where the library now stands.  The 1964 Scotsman, the Alma College yearbook, opening page displays a picture of the library construction with this quote written across a tilted metal beam, “Everything That’s Fastened Down Is Coming Loose.”  It did.  Not only for us who were college freshmen, but for the world.

I journeyed back to Alma, wishing to recapture the physical presence of where I stood that Friday afternoon.  Like just about everyone else who is anywhere over age fifty-five, I can immediately recall the sequence of events of my afternoon on November 22, 1963.  The day was Michigan November chill: a damp seeping through your jeans until you feel cold and wet, inside and out.  (Actually, I probably wasn’t wearing jeans.  Skirts to class were still the norm. ) Yesterday the icy air seeped into me again.  But I had to imagine the corner of Old Main where I first observed fellow students with distraught, dismayed looks huddled around a transistor radio.  Old Main burned down in 1969.  I easily found the plaque and stone since I relive the memory of where I was every Nov. 22.  Even with the transistors blaring, we good students still made it into our French lab and dutifully put on our headphones.  But our observant French professor (at Alma the professor ran the lab, not a teaching fellow) quickly realized conjugating French verbs was not going to happen that afternoon.  He dismissed us and as I walked across those wet planks, I witnessed the flag at half-staff.  I knew. 

My world didn’t radically change or transform with the day.  Instead, the confusion and chaos of that week end made everything seem like the moment stood still, being replayed again and again.  Only now, reflecting backward, do I observe the transformation I began: the loss of something sincerely sweet: a security that life stayed fastened down.  Transferring to the University of Michigan the following fall, I witnessed vicious Vietnam protests and read The Feminine Mystique.  Life’s living had indeed come loose. 

Traveling back to Alma I hoped for a profound thought, an amazing revelation about me, about my world, about all that came loose that bitter Friday afternoon.  I found none.  But I did discover once again, reflecting on where I have been to where I am going is an ongoing process: continuing on the continuum of life's good and bad.

On page 172 of the 1964 Scotsman are sepia images of that Friday afternoon.  The only words are, “for a moment even the ‘human chaos’ stopped…then life went on just as before--- almost…”