PARTING SHOT

Possible early warning sign of mid-life crisis: a growing nostalgia for your college days, which you know full well had their share of worry, tedium, and general foolishness. But memory is seldom reasonable, and over the past few years I’ve felt, as summer turns the corner toward fall, a yearning for those fast-receding days. The backward tug seems stronger this year than usual. Perhaps it’s because my son is starting college this fall. Talking with him about books and courses and degree plans has shaken loose some clogged memories. And there’s something else. I’ve finally decided, after years of rationalization, to contribute to my alma mater’s annual fund. I plan to send double the amount requested, just to make up for lost lime. But while that will mean a four-figure gift (counting the two zeroes), university officials should not think -in terms of new buildings and endowed chairs. A couple of nice wicker chairs, perhaps, but nothing grandiose.

There must be a saying among fundraisers: if at first you don’t succeed, try fifty more times until the guy realizes he’s never going to be rich and quits putting it off. The diligent folks at North Texas State University-sorry, make that the University of North Texas-kept at it, and it finally worked.

“Remember North Texas in the Seventies?” begins the fundraising letter. Sure. I graduated from there in 1974 and took another degree, which I plan to use any day now, a couple of years later. By the way, it was a clever tactic to have a journalism professor write me. We’re sort of in the same racket. But why did he have to ask if I remembered streaking and the gas lines?

As they say in the comics, arghh. Yes, I do remember, and it would be hard to think of anything from that lumpy, unwieldy decade less likely to make me swell the coffers of dear old NTSU-cum-UNT. I wit-, nessed at least a dozen episodes of streaking during those years, both on and off campus, and this truth is burned on my brain: nobody you ever hoped to see streaking ever streaked, and most of those who did should have been eternally forbidden to disrobe, even for bathing purposes. As for the gasoline shortages, anyone who had a driver’s license then remembers sizzling in mid-August heat while creeping toward the pumps-and that helpless, murderous rage you felt when they stopped selling just as you got your turn. Anyway, how could we forget? Republicans never cease to remind us that gasoline lines will reappear the day we put one of those tax-and-spend Democrats back in the White House.

Even these bad memories, however, stirred some better ones from the murk of time. The professor also harkens back to the TUB, the temporary union building, a cavernous structure that housed the cafeteria, student store, etc., for what seemed like eternity while a new union building was going up. Once you got past the droves of workmen with their scaffolds and sandblast-ers, the TUB provided what any real college must: a place where undergraduates could drink decent coffee, gripe, and straighten out the world. How well I remember reading a disturbing yet strangely beautiful poem there one day, and feeling for perhaps the first time the power of great writing. And I’ll never forget sitting in the TUB with several buddies the day before the 1972 presidential election. We all agreed, with the insularity that is natural to college students, that George McGovern would narrowly defeat Richard Nixon. After all, everyone we knew was backing McGovern, who only missed by forty-nine states.

On balance, my college memories are very pleasant even though I avoided what was, and is, the central fact of college life for so many-fraternities. (In fairness, let me add that they also avoided me.) Greeks of all sorts, both Platonic and weejun-wearing, were at low tide during The Relevant Years, and I arrived on campus with a deep prejudice against anything with Chi in the name. Fraternities were a tweedy anachronism, the kind of high school nonsense I was ready to escape forever.

But to my father, who never attended college, fraternities seemed like something solid and practical-fun while you were in, maybe beneficial later on. All his life he had heard people who were better paid, people who ran businesses, chatting about their fraternities. He believed, I think, that a shadowy network of frat buddies secretly ran America. If you wore the right ring, some body from good ol’ Ramma Lamma Ding might call any day and tell you about some juicy investment or a great job opening. That was something concrete you could take away from college, not like Wordsworth and Freud and Malcolm X and all those windy notions that were always fouling up Sunday dinner. I’m not sure we ever patched that one up. (And you know, he may have been right about that secret network.)

This is not to say that fraternities involve nothing more than terrorizing new pledges and praying to the porcelain god. Sure, they yield lasting friendships and provide a safe harbor in what can be a strange new environment. But they are really a sideshow, not the main event-a means, like football teams and shiny new buildings, often mistaken for an end. It’s hard to see at the time, but much of the “college experience”-the sports, the partying-can be enjoyed in later life. What is much harder to get, once our college days are past, is that deep, intense immersion in the world of ideas that college makes possible. Most of us will never again enjoy such a concentrated period of intellectual stimulation and relative freedom from the workaday world. It is a time for filling up the mental wells we must draw from in the rest of our lives, a time for pushing back the boundaries of our vast ignorance. With the right attitude, that task can be tackled at a prestigious Ivy League university or an “ordinary” state school. Without it, all the Harvard professors on earth will be powerless to help.

If he’s as smart as I think he is, my son will discover books filled with wisdom the best movies can’t offer. He’ll meet, in history and literature, people truly touched with genius, men and women whose greatness was not manufactured by publicity agents and beside whom our celebs-of-the-moment are as nothing. He’ll read the words of statesmen who did not steer by the fickle winds of the opinion polls.

And he’ll look back one day and realize, to his astonishment, that there was a golden time in his life when the only thing people really expected of him was that he go and learn as much of all that as he could.

It’s a precious time that is well worth paying for, even if the gift is very late and very small. The check’s in the mail. Call it a first installment.