Page 197 - WhyAsInY
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Chapter Fifteen
You Can Take the Boy Out of Brooklyn SEPTEMBER 1961 – NOVEMBER 1963
Wherein our author is taught many valuable lessons—among them: to sing, with pride and gusto, about an English soldier who apparently advocated distributing smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans.
Toto! Now I Know We’re Not in Kansas
It was a dark, although not a stormy, night when I entered the Lord Jef- fery Inn to have a farewell dinner with my parents. That afternoon, an enormous and handsome senior who would be my dorm advisor assisted me in carrying my luggage up two flights to my assigned room in Mor- row Hall. Actually, I think that I had assisted him. I would have schlepped my luggage by myself, but, as I soon figured out, “schlepping” was not something that one did at Amherst.
There were, it transpired, an awful lot of things to figure out, the first of which was that one did not dine at the Lord Jeff without a coat and tie. (One did not wear a coat and tie when one dined—make that “ate”—at Lundy’s, Cookie’s, Wolfie’s, Joy Fong, or the New China Inn.) Somehow, a tie was located, and I managed to convince the maître d’ that, in light of the difficult circumstances of my transition from the
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