Sunday afternoon of Parents’ Weekend, in October of 1960,
Second Form year, I kissed my parents, stoically waved goodbye, and watched our
1953 robin’s egg blue and white Buick Roadmaster roll out of the North Dorm
parking lot and cross the bridge into Kent. I ran back to the window at the end of the Middle Dorm South
hallway where I could look out across the river, beyond the wide field with a
single barn sitting in the middle of it, and wait for a last look at the
Roadmaster making its way down Route 7, tears streaming down my face.
It’s taken years to realize how lonely and unhappy I felt
during much of my early time at Kent.
Back then I played into the notion that I wanted to go away, unaware of
my own feelings or too afraid to speak up and tell my parents I’d rather be at
home. How could I speak up given
the sacrifices they were making to give me the best education they could
afford, to give me opportunities they’d never had? Sacrifices that included driving that old Roadmaster into
the ground, until one Christmas Eve after a midnight service it refused to go
into reverse in a snowy church parking lot and mastered roads no more.
For me the forced purchase of a new car prompted great
relief. I could return to Kent
after Christmas break secure that the antique Roadmaster was no longer fuel for
taunts. My family would arrive at Kent in something new and shiny. One less chink in my armor for tormentors
to exploit. My relief was short-lived. Tormentors continued unabated with
clever new and recycled old material.
Third Form remains the absolute nadir of my existence on
this planet. Having endured the
prior year where I arrived as the smallest boy in the school (4’ 11” and 87
lbs.) and shouldered the eponym Embryo (earned while scriming for food – thanks
Perry Wroth!), as well as sharing sufferings, humiliations and deprivations
with all my classmates, I naively believed a new era would dawn, relieved from
bullying and oppression. For me,
Algo’s haze was never rent that year.
Rather, as I waded through Pilgrim’s Progress in English class learning
about the Slough of Despond, I never fully connected to my own hurt, angry,
lonely, up-to-chin-level deep slough.
Yes, there were French fries at a soccer banquet, a kind reward for
being a ball boy. Yes, there was
Junior hockey. Most everything
else felt like a re-run of the initiation rite we’d withstood the year before. The sky seemed always grey, my mood
always blue, no matter what I might have tried to pretend outwardly. I recall one teary meltdown in a German
class after lunch. I’d just gotten
the worst grades I’d ever received in my life, far worse. I have no idea what comment, what
rebuke, what slight set me off, but there I was – in front of Bill Kurtz, in
front of Steve Alpern, in front of George Harvey, in front of Herr Cartwright, in
front of the WORLD crying out of control until I got to leave class to pull
myself together in a Schoolhouse bathroom.
Fourth Form Year I returned late from a hockey practice in a
rush to clean up for Friday night inspection. Peter Lewine and I began to argue
over who should do what, or who hadn’t done what. Failing the inspection was
imminent. Words turned to
wrestling. I remember rolling
around on the floor when a thumbtack (which should, of course. have been swept
up) pierced my back. Then more
thrashing around and my leg kicking the large blue and yellow Triple S Stamps
sign that decorated our room. It
rang like a gong and crashed to the floor. The hullabaloo attracted our floor inspector, George
Bourne. Sadist that he was, he
stood there and egged us on for his own entertainment, baiting us while knowing
full well we were forfeiting any chance to pass the inspection. He’d get the double pleasure of
watching a fight and then stinging us hours. In short order Phil Davis, Senior
Prefect, arrived to inspect. One
more time my eyes welled to overflowing, as I couldn’t hold back my frustration
while trying to reason with adolescent authority. No luck. But
I’d begun the practice of speaking up and taking care of myself. These were
neither tears of self-pity nor remorse, but pent up passion and rage breaking
through.
Some of the worst moments of my life were at Kent. How could they not have been, given
adolescence? I recently listened
to a TED talk by the writer and lecturer, Andrew Solomon, about how the worst
moments in our lives make us who we are.
Solomon has led me to ponder how I, or we, may have forged meaning over
the past fifty years from our experience at Kent. He mentions avoidance and endurance, two tactics I employed
generously in navigating my early Kent years. Solomon says, “Avoidance and endurance can be the entryway
to forging meaning. After
you’ve forged meaning you need to incorporate that meaning into a new
identity. You need to
take the traumas and make them a part of who you’ve come to be, and you need to
fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a
better self in response to things that hurt. “
Fifty years later we are clearly, and blessedly, not the
same people. I speculate on what
Kent made out of us, and what we made out of Kent. Never a chemistry student, I struggle to understand the
molten amalgam that helped form us, may have galvanized us in some way, and
created bonds between us.
A little over two years ago Kent would bring me to tears
again. Our son, William, died of a
heroin overdose. I arrived early at
the church where his memorial service was held. As people began arriving, I found myself walking down the
aisle to greet them, touched over and over by the outpouring of support. My trips up and down the aisle became a
reunion. Classmates going to great
lengths, in distance traveled, inconvenience put aside, or both, to be with us. In a way life had come full
circle. A boy separated from his
family. Only now I was the father, missing that boy so very sorely.
As I rose to deliver a eulogy for William, there they
were. Dear friends. Lifelong friends. Kent friends, providing the comfort necessary
to carry on. We’d been through so
much together, beginning with our dawn at Kent and on into the fullness of our
lives. As I began perhaps the most
difficult task of my life, celebrating my son’s far too short life, there was
no better support, no finer evidence of the better selves we’ve become than the
compassionate faces letting me know how much they were there for me.