Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. As we move into April, I hope there’s a memory that every Baylor alum can relate to in this June 1983 Classic article: the characters on campus, Diadeloso, dinners at Health Camp. Name any tradition, archetype, or conversation–it’s probably covered here.
April may be, in Eliot’s familiar phrase, “the cruelest month,” but university students, surely everywhere, go their way seemingly unaware that examinations are being bred out of the dead land of bluebooks and scantron sheets. After all, such trials are scheduled for early May. They have world enough and time to see Shelley plain, to memorize fundamental identities, to recognize Bach or a Matisse, to name the chemical elements. Time enough to distinguish Tudor from Stuart, feldspar from mica, French grammar from Fortran; time to debate morality and foreign policy, to apply the precedent of Marbury vs. Madison, to formulate hypotheses and syllogisms. Time enough to write papers on Freud and Hegel, Isaiah and Chekov; time to sort out entrepreneur, etymology, etiology, entropy, et cetera. Time enough in May to shut a final door on all research.
Now, in April, they are here–10,000 and more–a litany of voices and faces. Caught like a creaky one-reeler, a whirl of mornings and figures, moving, grouped, a world: dormitory and apartment and house, classroom, marina, language labs, practice rooms, BSU. And young lawyers-to-be looking serious and harried, ebullient sorority girls singing, and grave professors in tweed coats and ties, sometimes not quite in fashion. A few looking as if they’d bought brown polyester pantsuits from Goodwill. And Calvin Klein bluejeaned young men in starched white shirts, button-down, of course, and Sperry topsiders. And on these almost-spring, sometimes-summer days, a lot of walking shorts, sandals, even a few bare feet–the more casual, indifferent ones.
They have come from small dots on the map like Fish Kill, Yazoo City, Tulia; from Dallas and Houston, from Mobile, Nashville, Phoeniz, and Peoria and San Rafael and Muskogee. A few internationals–1.5%, we’re told–from far-away places: Tokyo, Vienna, Quebec, Hong Kong, or Cacutta, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg. They come bearing their strange-sounding names–a Sunil or Kasumi or Francisco, a Sigmund or Grete. Common names like Catherine or Jim or Sara, Alison, David, Mark. A campus world, fragmented, shifting back and forth over days, scenes. The problem is to separate, out of the mass of noise and movement, to focus, to find the still point at the center. Out of the passionate words and the trivial clichés, out of the metaphysical, the abstract, and the stale jargon to find the meaning, to shape a personal philosophy, to come to terms with life. To find a name.
Your name could be Emily or Carol of Kim. You are of average height, medium brown hair, attractive, optimistic, Baptist, product of an upper-class family. Your parents were Baylorites, and theirs before them. Like three-fourths of the others on campus, you are Texan, in your case proud of the fact that the portrait of an ancestor hangs in the Texas Collection. You feel the legacy, the tradition. You came here to grow–intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. And you have. You’ve discovered that it’s mostly a wonderful thing to be twenty. The experience you’ve absorbed is the world of Baylor; times, places, people have become part of you–a photograph album world: caught moments, some snapshots to hold.
Here it is: a flashback, your roommate that first year in Collins. You had known her as a senior in high school, had dated a couple of times together, had attended the usual graduation parties. So you ask for each other on your applications. On paper you seem to be ideal: both from conservative backgrounds, both wanting to join sororities. But you miss home a lot, ache to talk about it. In that, you are of two minds, never touching, even at the edges. She enjoys the freedom, relishes the independence, always seems sure of herself. Are there are common interests: slight ones, such as good taste in clothes–a closet full of Izods and Polos, of pleasant blouses and cotton skirts, Anne Klein bags, and Louis Vuitton luggage. And deeper interests too: music, guys, the outdoors, even books. But you seem to need other people around more than she does. Too, she has a peculiar habit: she sits in the dark, alone. So you do your reading in the library of in the study hall. The next year her parents will buy her a condominium, and by then you will both have made closer friends.
You can find what you want on this campus, the mediocre student is here as elsewhere. But you are looking for vibrant, assertive, intelligent friends. You find them. This fall it’s an apartment, three bedrooms, five other girls. Two of them pair off; one goes her own way; Alison and Catherine and you will become inseparable. You all like to talk–about Kafka and Alan Alda and C. S. Lewis, and Tom Selleck and Dustin Hoffman. You like Chopin, Beethoven, and Verdi, Willie Nelson, Louise Mandrell. You read: hometown newspapers occasionally and, because it’s here, the Lariat–you like the truth-in-jest of “Bobby Baylor.” You keep Time on your coffee table, or People. And you read The New Yorker when you have time. You have lots of passions among you: Beetle Bailey, Chariots of Fire, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Steinbeck and Conrad, Dickinson and Lewis Thomas, Caruso and Jenny Lind, and Van Gogh, Chagall, Turner, Blake, candlesticks, quiche, frisbee, Letters to the Editor.
There’s diversity in your unity: one pre-med, one journalist, a hybrid English lit/voice student, an uncertain pre-law and/or teacher-certificate person, and two business majors, one at her parents’ insistence. You believe in all things intellectual–and frivolous. You are by turns happy and sad; and though you have your off-days, the atmosphere is mostly upbeat, witty, full of dialogue and laughter and goodwill. In general, challenging. You study, you play, you cook, you confide in, you bless each other. Drawn together like magnets, between you the strong bond of sharing. Except for one.
Maybe there’s always one. She’s vibrant all right, and assertive, but an academic slouch. Baylor has more than its share of beauties, but beautiful more often than not includes smart. Not in this case. This one’s just a bit too much the golden girl, the all-out Miss America. Her hair a thick chestnut mass, eyes dark as caves. A hundred and five pounds of curve. Then she diets, always, eats yogurt for lunch and jogs, like most students. But hers you hear about, lap by lap. Well it’s her only discipline, let it be. You allude to it on occasion, and moan, “What a joke. Here I am, old Thunder Thighs. One step, and I register 7 on the Richter Scale.” You all agree that it won’t be your beauty that costs you your souls. “But,” you rationalize, “we have our minds.” The literature person likes to quote Yeats’ prayer for his daughter: “May she be granted beauty, yet not such as to make a stranger’s eyes distraught before a looking glass . . . Lose natural kindness, and never find a friend.” But small consolation, when you know it really is a guys-and-dolls world out there. But men and women, that’s different.
Maybe you know at once the one you can love–and hope he loves you. The hard equation of love and infatuation. You can’t get a guy like Jay our of mind, or heart. The old maxims don’t work: Out of sight, out of mind. Absence makes the heart . . . It’s Friday night, you are with him finally, have just been to see Gandhi, feel in a contemplative mood, and are sitting at the base of the flagpole in front of Pat Neff. He’s an idealist, too–his dreams run high. He can love a girl–if she’s organized; can love a girl who wants a career–but . . . You hope he finds you’re what he’s looking for. His list is long. On a scale of ten he wants ten. You expect some logic about the thing, but you’re still old-fashioned enough to want some spontaneity in it, some romance.
Well, romance is here, this spring, mid-April. Diadeloso, a day to play, without mud finally. The marina, sailboats, ATO movies, popcorn, softball, pie in the face, balloons, dunk the professor, Chambermen everywhere, Chuck II out of his cage, the band playing, the President riding a donkey just as if he didn’t have a thing to do. Lots of people, including couples, sitting cross-legged on the grass, or walking hand in hand, swaying to the rhythm of the day. It’s nice to care, to be cared for. Being in love–it’s really the best of times, the worst of times. You want to be with Jay, but he’s working in the arts and crafts exhibit. Sitting here on the grass–balancing lemonade on one knee and fried chicken on a paper plate–you see a lot, hear a lot. Your friend Craigs says he’s let a girl “dribble away his whole sophomore year.” She wants him only if she can’t have somebody else, so she keeps him waiting in the wings. Well, he wants to wait, obviously. Maybe she’s worth it.
Somehow today you seem to have been cast in the role of Mother Confessor. You’re uncomfortable with some things, just don’t want to hear them. But you do. This one’s on the loss of friendship, betrayal as Jan sees it. What can you say? Right now she’s wallowing in self-pity. And you can’t be her keeper. If you were, you’d like to dash a plate in her face on occasion, to tell her to wake up and take some responsibility for what happens. For her it’s always bad: grades, profs, parents, friends. Maybe she should sign up for ROTC–somebody there could tell her, CHIN UP, ABOUT FACE! Bad things do happen. You have them yourself: in your own family an alcoholic, a close friend killed in an accident. You’re not inoperative. Why use the past as an excuse? But you don’t say anything. Diadeloso’s not the time.
VOTE, the signs say. The signs are everywhere–all over the campus, the lawns, the buildings, any open space, or closed. Signs of the time. Signs saying Debra or Joe or Kelly would be better than someone else at something. Which one is best? Certainly you’ll vote for Mike and Brad and Becky: they’re friends. You can see you’re going to be a poor citizen. You’re swayed by the largest button, by the loudest speaker, by the multiplicity of signs.
The afternoon falls away. Three o’clock, you cross University Parks Drive, amble with a couple of friends toward your apartment. The parking lot’s full. All lined up in parallel rows–Firebirds, Thunderbirds, Mazdas, Datsuns, Toyota Corollas, a Trans-Am, a Mark IV. Fewer Cadillacs and BMW’s, but they’re here. A few more each term. Baylor’s moving toward a pedestrian campus, whatever that is. Right now, parking’s a real problem. You can see somebody else things so: a shiny brown Mercedes, one of those two-seater 450 SLC’s is parked in a HANDICAPPED ONLY space. Under the windshield wiper, a pink slip is flapping in the breeze. It’s easy to see it’s going to cost the owner $50. Well, as one prof says, He who dances must pay the piper. And he who parks . . .
Back at the apartment, the drone of hair dryers, the strains of Dan Fogelberg telling you to Run for the Roses, the aroma of coffee, a time to hit the books. The stomach tightens a little as you let yourself remember the calculus test in the morning. It’s 10:30, a drizzle is just beginning. In less than ten hours you have to cover the whole of Chapter 4, exercises on derivatives. Tomorrow’s one day nearer finals.
Despite tests, mornings are what you like best. You turn off Fifth onto Speight toward Waco Hall. There are oak trees there, and swings, where you can sit easy, quiet, and run over the math again. Daffodils are blooming, and the Indian hawthorne. Lots of birds–grackles, bluejays, mockingbirds, pigeons–all making electronic sounds–snaps and whistles, chirpples and whizzes, like a bad long-distance connection. They put a spark in the morning make you feel beginnings. Hope comes easy here. Students nod, smile, drawl out Hi, filing into their eight o’clock classes. You glance up and there he is, his eyes permanently fixed. Wonder what he’d think if he stepped into this century, this April? He’d know more secrets than any other man at Baylor. Lots of people have sat in his lap: friends confide in each other there, couples, pledges, parents. The Noze have painted him pink and blue, and the Chambermen have undone the dirty work. If only he could talk. You wish you could take Judge Baylor’s hand, turn it into flesh, pull him upright, let him stretch his legs. Then ask him over to have lasagne with the girls.
On campus, you move from one world into another–from calculus to psychology to religion. You sometimes wish for 15 to 20 minutes between the shifts. You need a course in sprinting, maybe roller skates would do it. At least there’s an hour break before Religion. You go to Miller Chapel to do a little studying. And there’s the same guy who always takes your time. You still have your mind on neuroses, on the Ego and the Id, and make the mistake of mentioning it. By now you should know better. He’s gentle, but insistent–persistent? You’d like to be fair, to listen, but thirty minutes of your time to be told that we don’t need Ego and Id? That we have to know the difference in soul and spirit? You try to be pleasant, civilized, but you’re annoyed. You’d like to say, “We have the Ten Commandments and an update in the Sermon on the Mount, which by the way I am trying to study. There are some great messages there. How can we keep them?” Why does he want to explain in detail what inspire means? You want to tell him you had it in Latin, and in English with “Ode to the West Wind,” and that your religion professor’s mentioned it several times. You want to tell him that the body and the soul and the spirit all seem tied up together, but he’s busy talking.
It’s a strange thing about being brought up in a religious atmosphere. It alters you, one way or the other. A poet here for a lecture said he’d had a “sparring match” with his Episcopal church for about two years, but it made him what he is. Substitute Baptist, and he could be speaking for you. It’s nice to feel safe enough to argue some things, to put them alongside your beliefs and know you’re not going to cave in. Your friend Don grew up in the same church with you back home: he was here a couple of weeks ago chiding you for still attending church. He seems to be into something called Back to Chaos; he’s just picked up the term existential, a word you had heard at home by the time you were ten. Maybe you have the right parents; they exposed you to a lot of things early. When that happens, you seem to have a center that holds. And Don’s off on a new tangent everytime you’re with him–from the occult to spirituality to nothingness. Time to go to class.
Ideas elbow each other for room. The Sermon on the Mount’s impossible to take in at one sitting. A lot of paradox, a lot of ambiguity. You think of questions you should have asked in class, but you’re on the way to eat in the Bear. Two of your best friends are waiting for you–friends you can say anything to, and do. You gripe about the guy who took your time before class, and then drop him. Your conversation turns back to religion, minus theology. You decide, as all of you talk, that the kind you like best is the religion you . In a lecture, or from friends who really care, who know you need something, Someone who transcends. You try to keep the clichés out, so you’ll take it all in fresh, new, let it work in your lives.
Brent’s disgusted about a class the day before in which somebody named Melissa had seriously asked where the Baptists were when the Catholic church was formed, and why the Baptists didn’t try to stop them. Fortunately there’s an antidote to that. Some Britisher had given a speech in Forum, something to do with virtues human beings need. Tolerance had stuck because of a story he gave. It seems that by one of those nice ironies of history, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I are buried in the same tomb in Westminster Abbey. The speaker had remarked that in the United Kingdom, much to their despair and shame, Catholics and Protestants were still fighting each other. Maybe if you could get a tape of his speech and send it to Melissa? Oh, well.
You’re tired of heavy ideas. Your talk turns to people who walk by. There’s a girl from Gatesville. Blonde, long hair, delicate face, dresses like some child out of a French fairy tale. To look at her, you’d never know just how tough and analytical a mind Wendy has. You wish she’d stick around so you could take the ivy chain from her at Ring Out. Someone brought up Sam, who seems to have everything, wins all the scholarships, good looking, articulate, impeccable background. Alfred strolls by with an ice cream cone in those big football hands, and you decide he’s the one who has all the talent. And then a girl in David’s accounting class. He comments that she won’t make the intelligence columns, but she’s got a lot north of the nose, and she asks the right questions. You remember a professor who says that’s what it’s all about, asking the right questions. Keeps stressing we may have to live with ambiguities, that we have a lifetime to work toward the answers. You see a graduate student who’s in your Western Civ class. Poise running out his ears, and imagination.
Conversations take strange turns. Over your spinach salad and baked potato, you begin to list the qualities you’d want in people you live around. Imagination comes near the top. And wit. You decide maybe you don’t need to take everything with too much solemnity, laughing’s important, too. And resilience and spunk and fortitude and trust. Maybe that’s what you’d like best—to trust and be trusted, be capable of being trusted. And compassion and generosity of spirit. My, you’re sounding great, you think–when she goes by, a really striking girl, trailing clouds of glory and Oscar de la Renta fragrance, and out the window goes generosity in favor of beauty. The talk turns to summer and the dream to a cruise around the Greek Islands. Alison mentions a siren, a girl across the way, pretty, brilliant, who’s on drugs, who blames everything on her parents’ divorce, who keeps saying how “free” she is to do anything she wants. But she can’t give up her habit.
Somebody brings you a new concoction called Teddy Bar—a strawberry ice thing–and you keep on talking. About the classroom–the smell of formaldehyde in Sid Rich, the way a professor in some class took off twelve points on a mid-term for not having the word mercantilism in a four-page essay, the sociology paper you got back with an “A.”
And then you talk about the profs who’ve challenged you, who’ve made you think. The biology prof who insisted on your best, but insisted gently. The Byron scholar who made you look until you saw, who demanded until you gave more than you knew you had, and who in turn gave hours beyond the classroom. The management professor who seemed to know everything about psychology, as well as management. The history professor who made it all come alive, and you were so impressed with his scholarship that you thought you’d like to be a history prof, except for the salary, and all the work. The German prof who made you want to learn the language and to pronounce it gutturally, deep in the throat. The professor who took time for your personal problem when you needed someone older, someone a little wiser. For the one who insisted you purge “fixin’ to” and “jist” and “cain’t” from your vocabulary. For the one who made you know the importance of language, of philosophy, of economics–and of caring.
And you talk about communication. About how only a few people really listen, how much you value those, and how you hope you are one. Another girl has pulled her chair over to your table, and a guy. He says his father never talks to him except about the menu when they go out to eat, or about whose turn it is to use the car, or about how much his textbooks cost. His father pastors a large church, and talks to all those people. But not to him, not really.
And about rush. About the excitement and the warmth, the closeness of working together. And Mark says he wishes he could trade places with the innocent freshmen again, so he wouldn’t have to feel responsible for the inevitable hurts. He didn’t want to know, he said, all the politics, rush tactics. And then about Sing. How you fizzled out finally and didn’t win a place in Pigskin, but felt the work was worth it, you’d gotten to know some people really well. And, after all, the classroom wasn’t the only place to learn.
And you ask questions. Some are rhetorical. What is it about Baylor that’s different, that makes you glad you chose this University and not another? Can you put it into words? Could it be the friendliness that everybody–from parents to distinguished lecturers–comments on? But it’s more than that, maybe a kind of pervasive spirit. Is it the mutual caring? Or the one-on-one relationship with the faculty and administration? Why do returning alumni feel so strongly about this place? Does it have something to do with belief and hope and values?
And some harder questions. Couldn’t the Honor System work more effectively–on a Christian campus? Why can’t you make the Blacks a little more a part of your life? You yell for them from the stadium bleachers, on the basketball court, love watching them jump hurdles and run track. But when the shouting’s over, what then? Has the head yell leader always been male? But then maybe the girls who are yell leaders want it that way. Why do some students think of class as an extra-curricular activity? Why do a few profs give such easy A’s so that when you make one, you don’t feel you’ve earned too much after all? And the Book Store–you appreciate the toothpaste and T-shirts and it’s convenient to buy your cards there, but why aren’t there more good books to choose from? Why is it sometimes too noisy to study in the library? Why do some students tear pages out of the library books when they could copy them on the Xerox machine? Why do profs push everything into the last few weeks? Why is it necessary to have 100 note cards for a research paper, and an outline? Why is spring break not really a break? Why are the classes you want always full by the time you get to register? Why, on April days, do you want to go to the sun deck instead of studying? Why can’t Jay see, now, that you’re made for each other. Why? Why?
And then it’s time for karate, and a long afternoon of lab. It’s 6:30. You check your last-of-April funds, enough for a hamburger and a diet Dr Pepper. You pile into the Cutlass, three abreast–you and Catherine and Kim and David and Brent and Mark. At Wendy’s the line is longer than you feel like standing in: you’ve had enough of lines. There’s an old place out on LaSalle called Health Camp. You sit in the car, and bring up more questions. Why does the term end so soon? Why can’t we all be going in the same direction? Why does life offer so many choices? You decide you’re getting terribly abstract, wildly philosophic.
The heady smell of onions ought to cure that. You take a bite of your cheeseburger, pass around the french fries, say what a nice spring it’s been, what a good term you’ve had. Nice and good seem safe, if imprecise. Then somebody in the group asks if you’ve ever noticed the words carved on the frieze of Pat Neff: “Wisdom is better than rubies.” And somebody else reminds you of the bells that ring, droning out a stand-by hymn in ragged time. And one of you mentions now much Daniel Sternberg meant to her, and someone else says he’ll miss the foot races and the picnics, and the trampoline marathons, the formals and Student Congress and Bear Downs, and playing tick-tacktoe on the sidewalk in front of Burleson. And the taste of chicken at Leslie’s, and the King’s Singers, and the smell of wet canvas in Hooper-Schaefer, Coke Hour in the Daniel Student Center, the noise in Penland Hall.
And then time shifts, turns–and it all comes in a whirl of mornings and faces, a photograph album world of things about to disappear.
