Page 215 - WhyAsInY

you Can taKe tHe Boy out of BrooKlyn
school with a lifetime supply of seeded rye bread. Either way, I’m pretty sure that he got his degree.
Someone determined that the most efficient way to administer the famed swimming test was to assemble the entire class at the diving board–side of the pool and to have the swimmers attempt to pass the test in alphabetical order, eight students at a time, one in each lane. They said that in this way, we could all learn everyone else’s name, something that I doubted. (I did learn some names from the tail end of the alphabet.) We would, on the other hand, absolutely learn a lot more. As there was apparently a dearth of swimsuits (at the school that we had been told spent a fortune on athletics), we were all required to stand and await our test entirely in the raw. The sight of a mass of flesh, consisting of more than two hundred relative strangers not knowing quite what to do (after all, nobody had a book to read or even pockets to put his hands into), no doubt had a profound effect, although whether or not a positive one I cannot say. I do know that whatever the effect was, it was murkier to me than it was to others. Everyone who wore glasses had to leave them behind in the locker room, and by then my vision was probably 20/200.
Two other bonding events were tried. They were the all-freshmen cookout on some hill, and the apparently annual prearranged water fight between the freshmen in Morrow and the sophomores in the nearby, mostly sophomore dorm, Pratt. The first event was okay, and probably better if your idea of fun was to sing “Three Jolly Coachmen” (which I didn’t really know) with a bunch of guys (whom I certainly didn’t know); the second did nothing for me.
S.P.? Not for Me.
And speaking of something that did nothing for me: We now turn to my social life during the first year of college. Let us first recall that, while I started the year at sixteen years of age, the girls at the local schools were primarily the age of the other boys in my class: as noted, eighteen. To start with, eighteen-year-old girls did not even have a heck of a lot of
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