Chapter 4 - I Go To College

I graduated from high school in 1963. Snoopy was our class mascot. I had already done the PSAT thing and the SAT thing. No, I don’t remember my scores; much higher in Verbal than in Quantitative, probably a great enough difference to constitute “scatter”, if “scatter” is an issue with this test. “Scatter” apparently means some dark psychological forces may be at work in your psyche. (May explain a few things down the road.) I was accepted by a four-year state university in a brutally cold little north country community, with the best fall weather anywhere, everything deep golden and russet with filtered sunshine and sunsets that drenched the sky with saturated color and all of it reflected in the river so that color was all around. It was just three hours from home but I felt, at the last minute, like I had been banished to Siberia instead of going off by choice to satisfy a lifetime goal. How could I leave everyone? I did it, I set my head straight forward and followed my nose, but I felt like a traitor, and a pioneer, and a victim of a terrible dismemberment. I knew that this parting was temporary, there would be vacations and semester breaks. But I also knew it was permanent, because I would go home as an outsider. I had thrown in my lot with the wide world and agreed to miss huge chunks of family history, which would take place without me.
I sent Mom and Dad home with my throat muscles clenched so tight against crying that I could barely breathe or speak and I went to college and had a great time.
I decided to major in English because it was my best subject. I had been discouraged about architecture by my guidance counselor after she saw my math test scores. Majoring in English does not prepare you for an actual career. To be practical I became an English Secondary Education major so that, if I had to, I could teach when I left school. What was I thinking? Of course I would have to teach when I left school. My family had no money and neither did I.
In my first year my roommates were music majors, nice girls, but they were never around, always practicing or performing or preparing for a performance. I was so lonely. I lost forty pounds from homesickness and from having a balanced diet for the first time in my life. Pasta and potatoes were no longer my major food groups. I discovered protein.
Typical dinners, chez Taylor, consisted of potatoes with hamburger gravy, potatoes with chipped beef gravy, macaroni and cheese (all of these recipes involved a roux, all were delicious, and all were way heavier on fat and carbos than they were on protein.) We also had spaghetti and meat balls, meat loaf and potatoes, beef stew, pot roast with potatoes and carrots and gravy, chicken and biscuits. My mother lived through the Depression; she knew how to stretch a piece of meat. Later I had a boyfriend whose family had been migrant workers in the South and I learned about neck bones (which have even less meat than our gravies often contained) and red-eye gravy, which actually has no meat at all but uses burnt flour, so that it has a hearty, almost meaty taste. We used a lot of bullion in our household to enhance flavors.
We learned to make our own potato chips from real potatoes (which are delicious) and one of our biggest treats on a Sunday morning was to have fried dough with a variety of toppings. I preferred butter and salt, other family members preferred frosting or maple syrup or even jelly, or occasionally cinnamon and sugar.
So when I got to the dining room in college and was offered a whole steak instead of a small slice, I was pleasantly shocked. Our cafeteria offered only one meal a night and everyone had to make do with that one meal, like it or not. Our cooks were good though. In fact it was rumored that boys from the neighboring school dated girls from our school just to get invited to dinner. We had a huge cooler that offered all the milk and orange juice you could drink, no limit. By the time I left home to come to college “the big kids” at home were supposedly limited to one glass of milk a day and orange juice was a very rare commodity in our house. I don’t remember what we drank before Kool-Aid, probably lemonade, but as soon a Kool-Aid came along we made several huge pitchers a day. Fizzies were also very popular at our house as we rarely had soda.
College food all by itself was therefore quite a culture shock to me. During my second year I had roommates from Long Island who ate things like blue fish and salmon, lobster, shrimp, clams, etc. One of my roommates actually had a summer house (well, her family did, although it was north shore, not south) where she went clamming frequently. I had never eaten any fish but fried haddock. Although we weren’t Catholic, everyone in our town ate fried haddock. This was before fast food. This was about the only take-out you could get.
At college we all went out to restaurants at the drop of a hat, sometimes just for a snack after a movie, sometimes when someone’s parents were visiting or if we were in town for an off-campus class. We learned to drink too. Sometimes it was 40 below zero for a week at a time. You had to warm up somehow. We played chugging games while our legs thawed out (girls wore skirts and dresses then). I never became a great drinker. Guess I don’t have that gene, thank goodness.
You just learn so much at college that is not about course work. You learn other people’s childhoods and customs; you learn to love things you never even heard of. I learned I had an extravagant streak. I loved things made of embroidered silk and real leather. I started to read through Mademoiselle and Vogue and Glamour, besides Look and Life. I learned about perfumes. One very stylish roommate introduced us all to the idea of men’s colognes for women (4711, Canoe). Instead of Avon, I began to appreciate Givenchy.
Once I started to room with fellow English majors we became a bit more flamboyant and artsy. We edited the college yearbook and the literary magazine, went to poetry readings and took oil painting. We had boyfriends who were poets or actors. I had a folk singer from Ireland. We hung out at the coffee house. We were before the days of student demonstrations and sit-ins; at least they hadn’t hit the North Country. We had curfews, and men and women had separate dorms. Almost every night a full contingent of fraternity brothers stopped by a dorm to serenade a girl who had gotten “pinned.”
For the most part we didn’t have cars and we walked everywhere we went until our junior and senior years when more friends with cars appeared on campus.
We studied hard. We usually went together to a study room across the quad from our dorm, a classically-dimensioned room with high windows, round tables and comfortable arm chairs in dark wood and fireplaces (not lit). We each took a separate table where we studied until almost curfew and then rushed home through the cold or shuffled home through the fallen leaves. We took breaks sometimes, in the snack bar upstairs where we could get orange juice and crushed ice to take back to our study table if we were in a time crunch. If we weren’t in a hurry we would order coffee and vanilla ice cream, dip a spoonful of ice cream in coffee and slurp and talk about whatever, sometimes gossip, sometimes deep philosophical stuff. And we would smoke. Yes we all smoked cigarettes. My sophisticated friend of the men’s cologne for women trend, got French cigarettes in black cases that opened like a woman’s compact. We were near the Canadian border. The cigarettes were oval, scented, and covered with pastel papers. For a while we all smoked these, but I soon settled on Parliaments and they became my cigarette of choice. I like the recessed filter. We could smoke or not smoke as we pleased in those days, because we did not inhale. We just puffed and looked mature and slightly jaded. So artistic. We were the Dorothy Parker Algonquin Round Table crowd of the North Country.
Our favorite movies were Blow Up, The Americanization of Emily and Putney Swope. I know that everyone was high in Blow Up, but I don’t remember actually seeing anyone get high. These were the first hippies I ever saw, but I didn’t know the word hippie yet. I don’t remember if anyone smoked in the other two movies, but it didn’t matter. Much more powerful influences than subliminal suggestion from movies were afoot.
I decided that, although I would probably have to teach for a living, I would have to live very large and have tons of experiences, even seamy ones, so that I could one day be a good writer. If you’re supposed to write about what you know, then it would be best to know about everything.