Away At The University Volume II, Issue 6 Dear Townspeople, Oh, before I forget - there’s two students in our department who are in wheel chairs, and our school just lets them go to classes and be in lab just like regular people! Maybe them people have a special talent at computers, like Stevie Wonder being blind. Funny, they seem like normal people when they’re sitting right across from you on a duplicate computer. And they say “hi” back and everything. I think I’ll bring that up at the next Sensitivity Training Meeting I’m so proud to have been invited to mandatorily attend. I’ve figured it out: Bill gates dropped out of stupid college, (where the teachers make you work so hard it hurts... like coaches, but I was up for it then), when he invented the computer with Steve Wozniak. Well, what if I told you I went and did him one better of an idea, and I may just take my plan over to that Sillycome Valley and set things up to where I’d be able to just relax the rest of my life like the Duck Dynasty guys? And I wouldn’t be the uncle who ran around naked ‘til he was six. Okay - Ready? This is big... here ya go: It’s a computer that shows you how to work computers! Bam! Don’t trouble yourselves with all the details, that’s just the big way we here think at MIT, Stanford, USCU and the like. I trust y’all, but I’m hoping Emmit won’t steal this idea and make one up in his TV repair shop. I hope all of you are well, and I mean that more now that I can see you all more clearly for the distance. I look at your faces sometimes in my mind - mostly as warm reminders of the things that really have mattered in my life; and, of course, on lonely occasions, when I picture each entire cheerleader squad spelling out the letter “K” in “Viking”, (but I’m working that out with my free therapist, the psychology student I met). Again I find myself in no shortage of repressive school work, yet in need of touch with a home which feels to have slipped from me each day I’ve been Away. Dorms, barracks, crash pads, companion-abandoned apartments, trailers and big, fine houses — and each new given ‘home’ experience seems to trample on the finely woven fibers of the original, precious one - the field of home - the place or state I believe I really had once. . . the different bunches of us who’d take off to Santa Cruz or Mill Creek Road or The City; the after-game pizzas and the courtyard at lunchtime and Chinese Fire Drills and massive T.P. raids and “truth or dare” and truth and dare. . . . And when you liked a girl/boy, then you found out they liked you back, and your eyes widened and “funny” had a new feeling. And she/he held your hand, and it was electric; and if your lips met, you felt on fire. And you were overtaken by a thing you’d forever later search to find its whereabouts. And those great maple bars from Winchell’s Donuts by the barbershop where I once shined shoes... but that was just my thing. You know, I just might trade back for all that sweeter, unmolested strand of time, that goodness of the Home, if I was able to today, as I write home to you now, here from the University of Sacramento College University. Okay, I know you’re all waiting for the big news: I have passed my mid-term exam in Anthropolophy. I’ve proven the ability to memorize things for two full pre-test study days. Important things, I guess. Lady Professorsauris taught us that the reason that grandmothers are nice to their grandchildren is found in the equation: Br > C, which means that your grandmother’s love for you is merely a big-bang instinct to cause the occurrence of forwarding her familial genes code. Gravitating closer to her twin Asoris*, our Professorette, (I think that’s proper), became a bit flummoxed when the girl in front of me spoke of the love and care she was provided by her non-bloodline “grandma”. These college science people are usually pretty good at figuring out why us people are the way we are, without out having to consider their ever being a component such as, say, love, in the mix of it all. Now, you’ll recall that *this specie, (and her hair is always wet when she comes to class, like she took a shower in the nearby girls locker room just after soccer practice, [but I don’t know why I threw that in]), does sport a build rather like the skeleton of the great hunching quadruped in the corner of the classroom, who’s structure would seem to be particularly well suited for support of our Professorsaruises’ hind quarters. When studying the natural differences of males and females in the Animal Kingdom, (technical term, invented by a Dr. Marlin Perkins, I believe), I asked her how the sciences of sociology and anthropology debated the 70s era feminist hypothesis, that boys would like to play with Barbie dolls as much as Spiderman, if they were exposed equally to both. She said she had plenty answers for me after class. I took her up on it. What an opportunity to hear from a great, Ph.D accredited mind. But being a product of the dual indoctrinations of departmental theory and the numbing world of political-correctness, she merely endeavored to reconcile the obvious contradiction by smiling patronizingly and practically reciting, “All I can say is, I’m sure there’s a great deal of agreement in the academic fields of culture studies, and it’s well discussed, and there’s even academic societies and things, and..., so...’cause... so...”. “Okay, thank you very much, Professor Johnson ”, (who’s name befits her originality of thought). My mind was . . . better, back with you all. I’m hoping that this highest of institutions will teach me how to remember stuff better, like, did this history thing happen in 500 A.D. or BC?, (apparently it matters); or that you can sneeze safely into a paper towel, but not a single Kleenex. (To the Ladies Auxiliary - please don’t send any more pink boxes of the Ultra-Soft, it makes me feel like I just done stuck my nose in a Vaseline jar, and the rugby guys don’t like that color.) And you all know I haven’t liked Vaseline since I got my temperature took down at Washington Township hospital, when they thought my mom said “5” instead of “9 years-old over the beige phone that hung on the wall between the kitchen and our Sundale home dining/family/office/play/school project/buffet room when they were scheduling my early morning tonsils surgery. The point of this story begins with the point of a special kind of thermometer they use for kids that are five years old, and not nine. Jill, our town nurse, can tell you that those kind are calibrated for the temperatures of specialized orifices. Well they didn’t stock the mouth-kind of thermometers in the preschool department that morning before my tonsil operation with Dr. McMahon. Yeah, let the point sink in. Ain’t pleasant, is it? Coffee costs $1.69 in the school cafeteria. A nutrition major told me it’s a drug just like heroin. Maybe my amateur pharmacy friend, Jack, knows where to get it some kind of “calming down” coffee. Ever since I noticed they cook up some mighty tasty lookin’ ham and cheese omelettes back over by the kitchen, I was thinking of stuffing a couple of them into my coffee cup and snapping the lid on as I walked to the cashier. But I thought to myself, “that’s just not the way we do people, back from the home I come from”. Besides, Sandy The Housemother made up some frozen breakfast burritos with Lil’ Smokies in ‘em. My roommate hasn’t called yet about how to get to the big party. I guess I’ll just turn off my desk lamp and crawl into my bunk bed. They make us get up in the morning. I think I’ll close my eyes and think about the girl once said I was sweet. It’s particularly quiet again tonight, and it strikes me that absence can be so searing. Your Favorite Son, Ricky S.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 05:54:26 +0000
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