Anything Before

My story...
Part 1 Part 2
Part 3 Part 4
Part 5 Part 6

Baylor University is really, in all seriousness, an excellent school. The professors actually encourage thinking as opposed to regurgitating.

This alone makes it almost misleading to call it a university.

You can wear shorts almost all the time at Baylor and you can go out at night and sit by the fountain and lay on the floating concrete blocks and stare at the stars. You can also climb the fountain and slide down with the water, but there are little "speed bumps" so it's better to use a piece 0f cardboard or something for the ride. And when you're done and all wet, you can go lay on the mall - a huge grassy strip about a quarter of a mile long between the fountain and the library (only in Texas can you "waste" so much land!).

You can run your hands over the old red brick salvaged from the first Baylor building and you can sit on Judge Baylor's knee. You can pull honeysuckle from the vines in the garden where Jesus is and you can hear your heart beat in the Armstrong-Browning Library.

You can go to the BSU (Baptist Student Union) and get a free coke anytime and you can get free Dr. Pepper floats in the Student Union Building, in honor of the hometown cola. When the Bears win, they light the entire dome of Pat Kneff Hall bright green - you can see it from the interstate! - and the bells will ring out "That Good Ol' Baylor Line!"

Everyone skips classes - even the professors - on Dia del Oso. We play games on the intramural fields and the Noze Brothers paint all the noses of the statues on campus pepto-bismal pink (including Jesus' nose!). "The Rope" will be available for those who enjoy a good spoof on The Lariat, our school paper, and we will make merry into the wee hours of the morning!

You can sail a sunfish on the Arm of God and dangle your legs through the rails of the Suspension Bridge and listen to Trout Fishing in America when they come to the annual Music Festival. You can jog on the Bear Trail and if you're lucky, you can even feed Oreos to the bears!

My first year at Baylor was an adjustment - which is to say an adjustment like the kind the San Andreas Fault goes through on occasion. The sheer force of class adjustment (social class) sent me skittering through the semesters like a forgotten cup of Starbucks moments after it leaves the roof of a moving car. Add to that the religious challenges laid down by that department, the political challenges I encountered in debate classes and the challenge of clear thinking presented by the exceedingly unfamiliar (to this little country girl) inner-city.

For whatever reason, Mission Waco lost me the first year. I volunteered to help with a Teen Club. I was placed with two other students who overtime developed a severe case of sanity and left. I was the only stupid fool still showing up and trying...to do...something.

I made Kool-Aid. And brought cookies. So, you know, I always had a crowd.

I have no idea what I said to them. Really. I have no memory of it.

I remember Joey and Christina and Christine. But I don't remember what I said.

Anyway, that was a very hard, very lonely place to be.

But it just so happened that the rest of the clubs, which were in regular contact with each other, were taking a summer trip to Colorado. And it just so happened that someone found my information and remembered that "hey, wasn't there another club out there, somewhere?"

So they called me and asked me to go. I had never been to camp before. In fact, I had never camped before. Perhaps we didn't need to do that, since we were so country anyway, but whatever. I felt excited about camp - and weird to be excited since I was suppose to be a counselor and have it all together.

Also, I'd never been to Colorado. I'd never seen mountains.

I remember the kids we took from Waco bouncing in their seats asking, "Is that a mountain?" as we drove by (what I now know as) small hills. But on that day, I was asking the same question, just too embarrassed to ask it outloud. The other counselors (who took regular ski-trips to Colorado with their filthy rich families) would laugh and say, "No not yet!"

I was so torn trying to act like I knew what a mountain looked like when in reality I was just as clueless as our kids.

I fell asleep in the breath-taking expanse of the Texas panhandle and woke up the next morning in a Colorado cathedral.

We stopped for breakfast at a little restaurant. To say it was "nestled" in the mountains would be misleading. More accurately, I would say it looked like a rare oddity that had found the only flat spot to land for miles. Every direction one could look, the darkest greens and deepest blues and purest whites and strongest grays patch-worked their way into a stain glass artwork that squeezed my heart so tight my ears started ringing.

The saddest thing about this memory is that I still felt the need to pretend that I had seen mountains before. I wished I had learned to be real before I saw my first mountain.

I think I would have sung. Or shouted! And laughed! I would have reached up to them and stretched as far as I could. And I wouldn't have blinked back the tears.

I remember watching the other counselors that week. They has spent a year together, working with kids and homeless guys and meeting for church under an interstate bridge. They were so...real. They were so real with each other and so in love with each other. And laughed like I had never heard people laugh before. And they were comfortable with each other.

And I wanted to be a part of this more badly than I had ever wanted anything before.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 1/31/2005 07:19:00 PM