Happy Anniversary Part 1

Happy Anniversary Part 1

Texting this Morning (2018-08-19)

2018-08-19 09:54 V to family: 41 years ago today we decided to weave our lives together.

2018-08-19 09:55 J to family: Was this when Dad hitchhiked up to Cleveland?

2018-08-19 09:55 V to family: Yup.

2018-08-19 09:56 L to family: That thumb got me the ride of my life.

***

Our Romance Part I: Un-courtship: February 1971 to August 1977

Photographic evidence proves that Lawson & I were together in February, 1971, but neither of us remembers meeting each other.

We were gathered in Holworthy B-21 for my brother Jefferson’s 19^th birthday party.  In the picture, I’m handing Jeff the cake, somewhat the worse for wear, having traveled from East Cleveland on the floor of Tom Fuller’s VW Beetle.  Mom, a home economist by training, a sex educator by vocation, and a cook by avocation, had baked a Wells family standby: yellow cake with boiled frosting and bitter chocolate dribbled on top and around the sides.  The chocolate appears somewhat green in the snapshot, an artifact of the cheap film or camera I hope, and not indicative of the dessert’s actual coloring.

Clowning behind Jeff, receiving the cake from me, are his grinning friends, including a few dormmates, his girlfriend Regina, and indeed, Lawson Wulsin.

Tom had given me a ride to Cambridge from Cleveland.  His parents had agreed to let his brother Dan use the family’s outgrown car for his last term at Brown.  It was Dan, by the way, who advised Tom, when Tom was admitted to Harvard, Yale, and Brown and was leaning toward Brown, “If you’re dumb enough to choose Brown over Harvard, you deserve to go to Yale.”  (Gag me.[1])

I was a senior at Shaw High School, and nobody batted an eye when I asked to take a week off to visit colleges, beginning with Radcliffe (Harvard), where Jeff was a freshman.  My timing was perfect, because during the first week in February everyone is on a high having finished their fall semester exams, and haven’t begun the grind of spring semester coursework.  Plus, professors are on their best behavior during shopping week, when students can try out classes before registering.

Some people might think February would be the worst time to visit Cambridge: dark, cold, snow, grit, grime, ice.  But its Give me the hip-high puddles of dark gray slush over Ithaca’s gorgeous gorges, cataclysmic cataracts, and cavernous chasms, and Princeton’s eroded, now sloped, marble steps, each tread whispering, “Tradition,” each riser murmuring, “Achieve.”  Give me, “Spare change,” “Hare Krishna,” the urine-soaked stairway to the T, and discount coupons for “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” over Cayuga waters and orange and black Princeton plaid.

***

To be continued…

[1] In September 1971, my parents piled my boxes of clothes, typewriter, bedding, into our ’64 Ford station wagon and took me to college via the New York State Thruway.  At one of the stops, another dishwater blond teenager was washing her hands, and I couldn’t resist introducing myself.

“Where are you heading?” I asked.

“I’m on my way to college,” she answered.

“Oh, me too!” I exclaimed.  “Where are you going?”

“Boston,” she answered.

“Oh, me too!” I enthused.

It was the first of many times I heard Boston as a euphemism for Harvard.  The joke evolved to the point where if someone answered the question of college with “Boston,” the follow-up was, “Oh, which House?”