I tacked this new paper next to “What I Know” on the wall to the side of my desk.
The sun was peeping through the trees, the temperature was perfect, and a light breeze was wafting through the casement window. I thought I’d reward myself with a nostalgic walk.
The SIU campus looked like pristine wallpaper that comes installed on new computers. Maybe, if there were no scenic woods in the middle of the campus, or a shimmering lake to the south, and maybe if Lincoln Drive didn’t curve in that certain way around the Point, then the campus would not have been the perfect thing that it was. I’d visited many colleges around the country, but this was my favorite. This was my alma mater.
As I strolled past the Agriculture Building on Lincoln Drive, I saw an image that, like so many I had seen in the past 24 hours, looked surrealistically familiar, but I couldn’t identify. An old man was walking toward me in gray bell bottoms and a blue paisley shirt with huge collar wings.
Probably a professor.
But as he drew closer, an old Daily Egyptian picture flashed in my mind, and I remembered the old man. He wasn’t a professor, but a student in his late 70’s going to one of the wildest universities in the country, living in the dorm, and attending classes with a bunch of crazy teenagers. There he was in his white belt and matching shoes, gripping a beat-up, old-fashioned briefcase as he slowly walked past the Life Science Two construction site. As we nodded at each other, another Egyptian article popped into my head, and I realized that I was passing a ghost. The old man had died shortly before he was to graduate.
I suspected that he would be the first of many ghosts I would see in 1971. When I got back to my room and looked into the mirror, I realized that the 20-year-old kid I barely remembered and who used to be in my young body was no longer there. So, in a way, I too was a ghost.
I found a Sherlock Holmes anthology on my bookshelf and started The Hound of the Baskervilles. I had to let the idea settle in my mind, that anyone I was going to encounter in 1971 would not be the same person in 2009, if they lived that long.
That’s why a 21st century man, now living in the 20th century, was sitting there reading about a fictitious 19th century detective.
By the time Harry got back to the dorm, it was raining again so hard that the sidewalk was covered in a mist of spray. My roommate was soaked to the skin and dripping water on the floor.
“Hey Harry, is it raining outside?”
I was back in good humor.
“No snake shit, I was walking my trout.” He glanced at his watch, toweled himself off, and rushed over to his portable TV.
“Bump-Bumpa-Dumpa-Bump” went the music on the TV as Harry adjusted the coat hanger/aerial.
“In color… It’s the Lawrence Welk Show!” said the chipper announcer on the black-and-white screen.
I’d forgotten about this.
I dropped my feet to the floor and walked over to the TV. There was Lawrence standing amid a shower of bubbles. “Anda nowa wonderfulla people, the Lennon sisters are gonna singa a songa from that famous rock and a rolla groupa-The Bee-AT-lees!”
The Lennon sisters sang “A Hard Day’s Night,” accompanied by a string band, a harmonica, and an accordion.
“Harry, you gotta be kidding,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
“Shush, Federson,” Harry said as Lawrence walked out on the stage wearing a Beatles wig and introduced Joe Feeney, who started singing “Eight Days a Week.”
“But Lawrence Welk? If anyone hears about this around here they’ll expel you from the university. No college student of the ‘70s ever watched Lawrence Welk, especially if he attended SIU.”
“I watch it, Federson; it’s good clean entertainment, so bite me!” Harry sat entranced and watched Joe sing in his piercing tenor voice.
Harry was as mesmerized by this program as he was by Freudian psychology, duck hunting, calculus, weight lifting and the Bible. Yet, I had no idea why he liked The Lawrence Welk Show. Well, now was the time to find out. I broke in during the Geritol commercial.
“Harry, why do you watch Lawrence Welk?”
He looked up from the TV with an expression that indicated this was a new question from his roommate. “No man, it’s personal.”
“What’s personal about watching Lawrence Welk?”
Harry looked out at the rain and shrugged. “OK Federson, I’ll tell you. I was in a gang in East St. Louis when I was a kid, and I got busted on drugs. The judge sent me to the juvenile home, and the only thing the TV could pick up was this one channel. Saturday night was TV night, and at 7:00 was Lawrence Welk. Lawrence was my first lesson on how middle class people behave…”
“But Harry, it’s not really…”
“…real? Yes, I know that Federson. But it was a start. Later, Father Mattingly taught me some manners, and I decided while I was in the home that I’d get straight, no more drugs. I got my GED and applied to SIU a few years later. Meanwhile, I did odd jobs: waiter, sold popsicles, worked in a junkyard, and other stuff. I took a few tests and they found that I had an aptitude for economics, and that’s how I got here, on a scholarship. And it all started with Lawrence Welk.”
That one paragraph was more than I ever known about Harry Smykus. The first time around, we hadn’t really known each other’s histories, because it really hadn’t mattered to us. Harry and I had accepted one another just as we were.
“Harry, you know that had you missed this program, you could see it again and again for years.”
“Fine, Federson, but I want to see it right now, so shut up, the commercial’s ending.”
Yes, The Lawrence Welk Show would follow Harry into the 21st century on rerun after rerun after rerun. I looked again at that Whitman quote taped to the radiator.
Next to it was my class schedule. The clock radio read 7:58…a little more than four hours until tomorrow—four hours until Monday became the present, and I would start improving my grades, my love life, my temper and my future. I would study Dr. Von Reichmann, seek out Catherine, and go to class. But algebra at 7:30 in the morning? No 20-year-old kid should be allowed to schedule his own classes!
Chapter 6
I woke up the next morning to an ugly buzz followed by the Chicago song “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” on WIDB, blaring out of my clock radio. I skipped the usual morning grogginess, the lingering over the coffee, the perusing of the newspaper, and went directly to stark raving terror. Today I would face Demonic Algebra, Sardonic Harry, who knows what horrors in the Radio & TV Department, followed by abnormal psychology—which I could easily identify with—and finally earth science, which I didn’t remember taking in the first place. And in the midst of my heebie-jeebie-filled day, I planned to go to Admissions and track down Catherine.
I fumbled for my Coke bottles and found them resting on the black book opened to this passage:
Five percent of your life is a surprise, while the rest is merely routine. Take comfort in the predictable.
Routine.
