Only recently have I come to grasp that not everyone is as
enthralled by the collegiate experience as was I. I loved every moment of my experience
from the time I hit the SMU campus in August 1969 until graduation in May 1973.
Every moment?
Even by my Nanno’s-own-grandson-gotta-love-this-life-thing
standards, “every moment” seems overwrought.
But upon reflection, I truly cannot remember even upon occurrence
of those inevitable challenging moments that arise even for us unusually
relentless optimists any real down moment.
The challenges were just part of the wonder.
A few obstacles to overcome.
A few thoughts to find my way out of the temporary roadblock.
Just another page on a Book of Life impelling me forward in love,
mission, and a future full of purpose and joy.
I could see at the time that for some the experience at SMU was
viewed through a very different prism:
Why else would healthy 20 year-olds, give or take a year or two,
spend their Friday and Saturday nights filling their gut with material that
came back up in unseemly ways?
Why else would so many people prove incapable of wrenching
themselves from lives of material plenty but devoid of spirit, known at their
upper middle class homes of nativity, perceived as the only life pathway open
to them, though down deep so many knew that the path ended in despair?
Why so much angst when there were so many opportunities on the SMU
campus: famous and insightful
speakers; many an organization for
capturing talent to be used for the social good; many good campus presences modeling the
well-lived life; many friendships
awaiting if made properly, in the spirit of good fun and healthful joy?
As one with ever firmer grasp on the tenets of behaviorist
psychology, I knew intellectually that experience is determinative, that my own
had been fortunate and fortuitous, while many others had widely varying
experiences that were not so conducive to a life of commitment, purpose, and
joy.
But so replete with wonder was my time at Southern Methodist
University that I could not fully grasp the emotional pain that many must have
been under, how trapped they felt by futures that seemed as inevitable as they
were prospectively unrewarding, how for others the issue was not so much
wrenching pain as the banality of the ordinary.
But I did know that I was one lucky person to have known Dennis
Weltman, Alan Deright, Shari Wheeler, Jane Bockus, Bob Cooper, J. Claude Evans,
Bradley Carter, Ron Davis, and, oh--- my
oh my--- Barbara Reed.
I knew that my experiences tutoring and counseling at Pinkston,
Buckner Children’s Home, and schools for the mentally challenged; coordinating these tutorial and youth
programs for SMU Volunteer Services;
serving as Chapel Board president;
going to Religious Life meetings and retreats; becoming a sophomore adviser and then
residential adviser; participating in a
wide array of intramural sports; hearing
and seeing Hubert Humphrey, Ramsey Clark (LBJ’s attorney general), Jerry Rubin,
George Carlin, and Dick Gregory; and
enthusiastically embracing SMU’s superb liberal arts curriculum; were amazing gifts to be packed away in a
metaphorical treasure chest as graduation present par excellence.
As I had been so primed for the SMU experience in August 1969, as
of May 1973 I was ready for the workaday world.
I knew that eventually I would be back in academia for study at the
highest level. But for now, I was ready
for the workaday, for teaching, for the world inhabited by putative adults.
Many of those adults would not be ready for me.
But the youth overwhelmingly were.
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