that the freshmen were awed. It was a tangible treat-they smelled the sweetness of the roses and were dazzled by the odd and brilliant arrangements of them.
As a way of setting a tone for taking in all that was new to them, the garden walk worked marvelously. The new students forgot themselves amid the beauty Jack brought them to.
“These roses are unique and wonderful,” he’d pointed out. “They bloom the entire year. I come here when I’m fed up or overwhelmed. It’s far enough away from the rest of the campus so that I feel like I’m outside of myself and can get perspective and solace just knowing that, despite all that seems so monumental and insurmountable, these flowers still bloom.”
In the back of the group that day, anxiously listening, Veronica Cashmiris stood out. She was tall, slender, dark and lovely and Jack couldn’t help but notice her. She’d stood back, shyly, but clearly listening to Jack’s every word. He knew she was listening and had adjusted his talk to see if he could get her to smile. Eventually she did and he smiled back at her only to watch her look away in a nervous retreat from further eye contact, a slender finger on her demure hand twisting a strand of hair around and around. He continued talking calmly about school, his message resonating reassurance, his clear blue eyes fixed all the while on Veronica and at last her deep brown eyes warmly returned his gaze.
Veronica didn’t see Jack after that for several weeks. School took over. She was the first of her family to attend college and felt compelled to start out right. Caught up in the hectic pace of her first month, she’d been carried along by freshmen’s continuing obligations. Everything was unfamiliar and both exciting and intimidating. Things happened constantly that felt foreign and compelling. Veronica hoped for calm so that the fuzzy picture of her new world might come more clearly into view. For her, it was that groping time . . . that dumb beginning that takes you and, like an anesthetic, allows things to happen around you that you are only vaguely aware of. Then all of a sudden a month and a half had passed and midterms arrived, knocking loudly on her freshmen door with frightening prospect.
She stirred like a blender, she rushed toward midterms like a person running blindfolded down a city street. Churned up, hell-bent, fearful and determined, she felt a world away from being at ease. These were her first tests at Duke and she needed desperately to do well. It was not that she hadn’t studied or didn’t understand her courses. It was that she felt a burden as the first of her family to go to college. Also, she was worried that the grant she had been given by Duke might be reduced or eliminated if she didn’t prove herself worthy. Frazzled, she longed for a time out.
She remembered Jack. What was he doing? How did he handle it? And she recalled his talk at the garden.
He had mentioned swimming on the college team. She got up, dressed and headed to the Underwood Aquatic Center hoping to see him. It was as if Jack, because of his talk of solace, had become the solace he’d described. He wasn’t at the pool. She considered where he might be, those gardens.
She walked back past a row of sturdy Magnolias that with their waxy green leaves and bursting saffron flowers seemed a line of boutonnièred Generals, too sweet smelling to stand with such decorum in so grave a place. She walked beyond them and beyond all the august halls they seemed to guard. She walked down a small flight of stairs to a parking lot, crossed the lot and proceeded across a wide sun-filled meadow. The fall sun warmed her face. Then a slight breeze blew toward her and refreshed her. She felt the wind gently push back her hair that shone chestnut-colored in the sunlight. She walked on steadily and halfway across the field saw on the terraced ground above the field dots of color that were the flowers of the garden Jack had shown her group on orientation day. She gazed behind her. All the gray-stone lecture halls and buildings of the academic departments were bathed in a soft, golden light. From where she stood, they seemed less and less intimidating as they sat quietly back, like unused books on a library shelf.
She came to a rise in the field at the far end where it swept upward to meet the garden. Now the tiny dots of color she had seen at a distance enlarged before her into yellow roses, extending toward her like welcoming bouquets. She gazed around the garden into the maze of beds. What at first seemed a confusion of colors had settled into an articulate pattern of beauty—balanced, accented, and amazing. Here, the gardener’s design had met God’s so that grace and beauty bloomed together in a brilliant spectacle. It seemed a symphony of color that she could all but hear. She turned and paused.
At the intersection of two lines of roses, recumbent on a patch of earth just large enough to hold him Jack rested, his arms stretched at right angles from his sides. He looked as if he might be sleeping until he sat up. He wore headphones and in one hand held a book. Veronica thought to move away, afraid she might be intruding. But he saw her.
“Hello,” he yelled, forgetting the headphones.
Veronica laughed. Jack understood why and removed the headphones. Then in normal volume he said hello again. A long silence followed within which Veronica’s mood turned like a weather vane blowing in the wind. At one moment she felt comforted by Jack’s presence and in the very next disturbed by it. What’d been really only a momentary silence seemed an eternity until Jack focused on her and spoke.
“Midterms,” he said.
His one word summed up everything. Veronica realized he knew exactly how she felt. She’d been understood.
“Do you get used to all the work?” she asked, rushing her words.
“I come here quite a bit,” he said.
There was an easy going attitude about Jack and it worked like a charm. In his presence she felt less frazzled, more optimistic. It was pleasing and peaceful to be with him in the same way it was pleasing and peaceful to be in the garden. Jack made a gesture toward a bench in the garden and they went and sat down together.
They sat without speaking and with little need to. But rather than causing additional apprehension the way silence between two people new to each other sometimes can, the quiet moment contributed to their affinity.
Next to each other the two made a remarkable looking couple. Veronica, half Lebanese and half Italian, was as dark in complexion as Jack was fair. She had long dark brown hair that shined chestnut colored in the sunlight. Untied, it fell down over her shoulders in a luxurious wave. Her eyes were almond shaped and deep brown, lending an exotic and alluring look. If those two people had been flowers, they would be a yellow rose and light brown orchid. But they were a young man and woman, beautiful as they were. Glowing in their beginning, radiant in their freshness and magical in their natural state-no more was needed for them to be all there was and ever could be.
“You know what amazes me,” Jack said after a while, scanning the garden. “We can get these flowers to grow all year, but we never take the time to smell them.”
“Sometimes it does seem to me that everything is a mad rush,” Veronica said, gazing around the garden too.
“We have to slow it down. Each person has to regulate their own clock to keep a more even pace,” Jack added.
“How’s that even possible today the way we live? I mean everything we do is done at warp speed. To do otherwise is to be left behind,” Veronica countered, still talking quickly as if to reinforce her point.
“I think it’s as Gandhi said,” Jack went on. “We have to be the change we want to see in the world. There’s no other way. And as I see the world today, no other choice.”
“You’re an idealist,” Veronica said, turning to Jack with a skeptical smile.
“God,” said Jack. “I hope so; I don’t
