2018-08-20 Cincinnati
Happy Anniversary
Part 2
***
Our Romance Part I: Un-courtship: February 1971 to August 1977
(continued from 2018-08-19)
Lawson’s and my first meeting (that we remember) occurred in September 1971. I had auditioned on the glockenspiel and been accepted into the Harvard Marching Band, whose stringent auditions consisted of “Breathe? You’re in.” (Our formation drills were similarly rigorous. The band major would fire a gun and we would all run into position. Simultaneous marching and playing were obviously too difficult for us.)
The band manager lent me a glockenspiel, and sold me a used crimson jacket someone had left in the band room for $10. I merrily loaded them into the basket of my 1-speed (never stolen[1]) red bike and pedaled back to Comstock, my freshman dorm in North House.
I donned my much-too-big jacket, grabbed my glockenspiel and mallet, and headed to visit john[2] beardsley, who also lived in North House. I knocked on his door, and started playing “Doe, a deer,” as he opened the door and let me in.
“Guess what!” I glowed.
“What?”
“I made it. I got into the Band!” I bragged. At that point, I still didn’t know the level of the Harvard University Band’s auditioning standards.
“So it appears,” john smiled.
“And I already have my uniform,” I did a 360 to show off my band jacket. As I twirled, I saw that john’s canvas butterfly chair was inhabited by a handsome blond guy with a smile that lit up the room, and raised his cheeks to create mere sparkles where his eyes should be.
“Oh, excuse me. I didn’t know you had company,” I apologized to john as I thrust my mallet in my pocket and stuck out my hand toward the stranger. “Hi, I’m Vicky Wells, glockenspiel for the Harvard University Band, at your service!”
Lawson kept smiling as he stood up, shook my hand, and said, “Hi-aye, Captain.”
***
In addition to john, Lawson & I shared an Ohio umbilicus; dickering re doctoring, via the humanities, for him, via the social sciences,[3] for me; a hankering for hitchhiking; a defenseless smile and absence of guile; frank Francophilia; WASP heritage (for decades, unrecognized (?), unnamed (?), so inevitable, so “given,” it doesn’t need noting); and, best of all, affection for my brother Jeff.
They were in Nat. Sci. 5, George Wald’s Biology 1-0-1 monster class, comprising gents like Jefferson, merely satisfying a “natural science” requirement, and others, like Lawson, taking it as one of the Big Five[4] course requirements for Med. School –
- Calculus.
- Biology.
- Chemistry – inorganic.
- Chemistry – organic.
- Physics.
George Wald hankered after a 2nd Nobel Prize. Linus Pauling won two: one in Chemistry, and the big one. George got one in Physiology/ Medicine for Vitamin C; I think Peace eluded him, despite his opposition to the USA war in Viet Nam.
Lawson and Jeff shared a lot, in addition to john: running on the beach, preferably naked; dressing-up for Halloween; infatuation with Regina Kay; outdoors.
***
A connection:
Peter Brooks plays percussion, which is the glockenspiel’s section, in the Harvard Marching [sic] Band, so we sit together and talk. One of his Quincy House suitemates is: Lawson Wulsin.
***
An interaction:
1972-73, I’m a sophomore, he’s a junior: john lets me know that Lawson is feeling lonely. I invite myself to dinner at Quincy House, where we end the dinner with Dixie Brown leaning over us, giggling about seeing the smoke circles rising from the aquarium where she kept her pet turtles, arising from their pipe-smoking marijuana. Dixie had a cute accent, something English about her r’s, that I learned only decades later, was the hallmark of Upper Class diction.
Turns out that repartee was the turning point in Lawson’s and Dixie’s relationship changing them from friends to sweethearts.
So it goes.
***
An interaction:
1972-73, same year. Outside Lowell House (base of F-entry). L’s wearing a gray, black, white Icelandic sweater; he tells me about TM [transcendental meditation] and Baba Ram Dass who taught him, “Be here now.”
Heavy.
***
What we didn’t share:
Upper class vs middle class
Financial wealth
Exposure to wider world
Private vs public education
Lean vs luscious
Physical activity as sport!
Household help
Bernaise and bordelaise vs casseroles and catsup
Legacy vs leftovers
Weighed-down vs bubbling up
***
Big interaction:
Christmas vacation 1972, riding home with him to Ohio.
Lawson was one of those rare H/R students who had a car. His parents bought him one, which he shared with his brother John, also at H/R, ostensibly so they wouldn’t have to rent a car when they visited Boston. At the time I thought it was hogwash, but I can see now the advantage of having a son or two meet you at the airport and whisk you to a hotel on Brattle Street, and not have to deal with car rentals, taxis, or, god forbid, public transportation (as in the bus or the T; you needed both to get from Logan to Harvard Square).
Lawson was already committed to dropping off a pair of skis and some other stuff at his brother’s in Amherst (obviously a detour from the Mass Pike straight to the New York thruway), and taking Libby Lazarus all the way home to Cincinnati, which meant that Shotgun was taken the entire way, but if I didn’t mind those inconveniences, I was welcome to travel in the way-back of his tiny station wagon, beyond earshot of the front seat, and certainly not secured with seatbelts. But splitting gas three-ways was totally worth it.
Back in the days of the pay phone. We called my parents as we crossed into Ohio. It was late – 10 or 11 pm. Dad and Lawson arranged a rendez-vous spot, and the connection worked. Dad was there to meet me. He shook Lawson’s hand, greeted Libby (still seated in the front seat, as if someone might snatch her place if she got up), and drove me back to Taylor Road.
Years later, I reminded Dad that he had actually met Lawson way back in 1972.
“Oh, was he tall?” Dad nodded, seemingly knowingly.
“Yes,” I answered.
“And blond?”
“Yes.” He’s on the right track!
“I don’t remember him at all,” Dad dashed my hope that Lawson had made an indelible impression.
***
To be continued…
[1] Actually, my bike was stolen – years later. I continued to ride it through college, med. school (pregnant with Wells, pumping up Cedar Hill), and motherhood in Cleveland, Boston, and Cincinnati (each of the kids spent time in the yellow plastic child-seat I attached above the rear fender). In 2001 I moved to Washington and used it to commute down and up 16th Street from my cousin Marty’s to my office in Dupont Circle, often stopping at Wells’s group house in Adams Morgan. After 9/11, I often spent the night at Wells’s. He always gave me the bed; he slept on the floor.
He left for work earlier than I, and one morning as he was cycling to work at H D Woodson High School (Northeast), he saw a man crossing 16th Street on my bike.
“Hey!” Wells shouted. “Where’d you get that bike?”
“Huh?” the man responded.
“That bike – that’s my mother’s bike,” Wells said.
“This piece of shit?” The thief had the audacity to insult my precious 1-speed, even as he hopped off and left it in the street.
Wells made the quick decision to get my bike back to his place rather than chase the morning’s dumbest criminal, because getting to school on time was his main priority.
I got my bike back, but didn’t use it much longer. You know it’s time to replace your bike when you have to pedal downhill.
[2] John Beardsley spelled his name in lower case when I first met him in 1970. He wrote his thank-you note to my grandparents, whom he called, as we did, “Nana and Boppa,” on birch bark and we envious Wellses argued about the ecology of using birch bark as parchment.
[3] Lawson’s and my sons contend that any so-called science denoted by the word “science” in its title is automatically suspect and most likely not a science.
Political science? Puh-leeze.
Social science? An oxymoron.
Earth science? What is geology? Geology is earth science.
[4] NOT the safari Big Five: Lion, Rhino, Elephant, Buffalo, Leopard.
VicWulsin 