Page 36 - WTP Vol. V #5

Afew years ago I took my two sons to look at Columbia University, where I’d been a student some thirty years ago. We went into the mathe- matics building, where my years at Columbia had begun. I had thought that I’d major in math until the thirteen-year-old in my calculus course held indecipherable dialogues with our famous Ger- man professor. “That’s a very interesting question, Jeremy,” the professor would say, and they would converse while I dreamed of basketball.
I went into Hamilton Hall, the building I had sat in front of during the divestment protests of 1985, when the doors were locked with chains. I even walked down to Riverside Park, where I used to play basketball and softball with other New York- ers. I went up and down Columbia’s great stone steps, past students sitting in the sun. How odd to see so many people wearing light blue.
Those years in the city were bleak. Reagan’s America filled the streets with homeless beggars. I’d give them my change when I left the deli with my sub sandwich and soda, trying not to touch their grimy leathered hands. The building where I
Everywhere I went, the memories came: doodling in my notebook during that calculus class, then walking back to my dorm by myself; sitting off to the side in the shadowy dark at the protests, soak- ing in the atmosphere, listening to the drums, the drums. And those games at Riverside Park. How
“The world was greater and more mysterious than I had
imagined....”
Columbia Elegy
It’s almost tragic how the rhythm of a thought can obscure facts. In those long-ago days I drank with friends in The West End, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s bar, gone today. My baseball teammates showed me how to chew tobacco, and I had a girlfriend whom I loved with all the beautiful confusion
of first love. Loneliness may be a passing mood more than the truth of my past.
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it pleased me when someone said “Good hit” or “Nice game.”
lived my senior year often had someone sleeping in the tiny vestibule between the locked and un- locked doors. In Greenwich Village someone tried to sell me pot, and when I said no he followed me for a block, saying “you hear about people getting killed in this city, this is why.”
I watched my sons appraise the glitter and force of the city, the majesty of those steps, and even if they didn’t come to Columbia, the city lured them, as it did me, and I stopped myself from saying no—don’t do it. I stopped because who was I at eighteen? Maybe I was meant to be alone. Maybe it wasn’t Columbia, or New York, that made me live this solitary life.
Those were the years Reagan joked “We start bombing in five minutes,” where posters in the subways and bus stops showed doomsday clocks signaling that we were less than three ticks from nuclear Armageddon, where I’d hear a jet zoom- ing over the city and, for a moment, wonder.
I stopped myself, too, because the words for my melancholy wouldn’t have come if I had tried to call them forth. How can one say, I always felt alone? And how can young men with so much mu- sic in their heads that it spills from their mouths and fingers understand how deep silence can be?
One afternoon during those years when I was at my work-study job in the school cafete-
ria we heard that Marvin Gaye had died. The Haitians and African Americans who were al- ways bitching at each other cooked their food silently as the radio atop the freezer played
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J.D. sCrimgEour