Higher Education

Orton Hall & Chimes OSU Main Campus

(Posting from the memoir--Old Man On Campus Ch.2) 

 

As for more personal reasons for my return to college, not long after I returned to campus, I had one of those mind-stretching revelations that can only happen in the atmosphere of academia.  The realization, painful as it was, nearly blinded me in its clarity.  Simply put, I harbored a deep resentment for my parents.

    That’s not terribly intuitive, so I’ll explain.  My folks, God rest them, were likely the hardest working, most conscientious, most caring parents who ever tended a flock of kids.  And we were a flock, there’s no other term for us.  Ten kids, in a raucous, energetic, persistently hungry family of church-going Irish Roman Catholics.  We were the Kennedys without the money or PR staff.  The revelation came to me as I sauntered past the lake that marks the southwestern perimeter of campus, into which body of water students make a traditional November sojourn prior to ‘The Big Game’.  Just as I left the quiet grotto of the lake, climbing a small hill toward the library, I heard the somber sound of the campus chimes.  The pealing of those bells across the verdant acres of academe, their tolling announcement of another hour’s passage froze me in my tracks, chilling me with a realization of how fortunate I was to be there, at that moment, on that campus, where the pursuit of education isn’t a luxury, or a fanciful hobby, but a sacred obligation.  And then, immediately after the tolling ceased, the pain arrived: My family placed no value on this.  Despite all exposure, all momentary and credulous nods toward its proximity in our lives, and its understood power to lift us above our raucous, lower-middle-class expectations, this campus was nothing more to them than a venue for the vaunted football team that passed for local sports mania.  That is, the school’s anti-intellectual identification was our only connection to it growing up, and hearing those chimes, with their mellifluous enticement to gentler, more cerebral things, tolled, in addition to the hours’ passing, the contrast between the world I’d known, and the one I now aspired to.  Hearing the bells, unable to stop myself from counting their measure, an ache erupted in my chest.  Tears swarmed, and I looked around, fearful that I’d be seen and discovered in my humiliation at displaying such emotion over the simple ringing of a bell.  I was afraid a young student would see me, and wonder what I’d lost, or who?

    But the tolling was deeply affective, because I had lost something.  And someone.  I realized in that instant, the last echo of the final toll wafting away, that what had also drifted away was the time I’d lost out of simple neglect for that part of myself.  I’d dismissed the possibility offered by the lure of those chimes, in pursuit of just such commercial and anti-intellectual arrangements as my parents had.  So why blame them?  That’s the truly painful part, and its teaching came hard on the heels of the first twinge of recognition.  It wasn’t their doing; it was mine.  I’d settled for the same path as they had, even perpetuating the terrain with my own child.  I realized that, as my daughter grew up, I’d never really stressed education to her, never truly expected her to do anything more than find a position, make herself employable, become self-sufficient.  The possibilities for an education in life are never ending.  Until the bells chime their final bit, there’s always time for one more insight.