We Roomed Next to Each Other

We roomed next to each other; he was a baby-faced kid who liked the symphony “From the New World.”  I felt like I was in a new world.  A northsider, his dad took us home and he dropped me off on the southside at a home I hardly knew where my mother lived up stairs and you had to walk along the side of the old home to get to the stairs that took you up to the little apartment.

We used to live in the nicest house in the neighborhood, but after my dad stepped in front of a train one evening, my mom had to sell it and move into a little apartment about a mile away and then after another year or so, I lose track, to the apartment in the old home owned by members of the church to which my mother and father had belonged.  I think she got a pretty good deal, but she had to hide any empty bottles of vodka she used to use for the Screwdrivers she enjoyed from the landlords who wouldn’t have approved.

I was a transfer student from junior college where I, as the audio-visual guy to make a few bucks to pay for books, brought movies around to classes and in between runs would listen to every thing Claude Debussy ever wrote and others recorded.

I sat and listened to him and other Impressionists as I looked at Monet’s haystacks lined up along the wall. I saw the fawn between stacks and I heard the sea as it roared over those mounds and my head bounced back and forth and back and forth rhythmically to the mesmerizing, plaintiff sounds of Ravel’s Bolero, before Bo Derek’s butt swayed back and forth and back and forth rhythmically as she walked on the hot sand to the water as Dudley drooled.

But when I left j.c. for the four-year school, I forgot all about the artists, musicians, works of Shakespeare and English composition and I felt so dumb. I listened to Dvorak through the wall and thought that I had never heard classical music before.

The northside kid’s dad was an attorney downtown and they belonged to the church of churches. My dad had been an elder in a little, suburban congregation and none of them knew what to say after what the coroner graciously determined was an “accidental death” but everybody knew otherwise. I didn’t go back much after all that.

We graduated and he went east to school, of course, and I stayed local for graduate school because the president of the school helped me figure out how I was going to graduate in four years so I could take summer Greek and go to his school.

Years later, the baby-faced kid had become the president of the school where I was getting a doctorate.  My sister asked me if I was jealous of his success.  I wasn’t but I did wish that he had invited me to his inauguration party. He shook my hand and laughed loudly and handed me my diploma and I left.

He fell on hard times. I see him now and then. He looks pretty old. I think about him when I hear Symphony #9.  He had had a great laugh and a baby face and a ton of talent and I still wish he had invited me to his inaugural dinner party.