LOVE

Am I just making this up, or was it not true that in addition to the intellectual emanations afloat in Wittenberg’s collegial air — the clouds of theorems and historic events, of philosophies and anatomies, of rates of sedimentation and the meters of poetry — was it not true there was also another atmosphere? Love? Or, if it was not love itself, then the potential for love? College was sold to us as opportunity.

At the end of four years we could leave with a degree on which to build a career. And we might also leave with a mate, or at least our choice of mate, with whom we could build a life. “When will there ever again be a time like this in your life?” That was the guiding question, often put to us at the very moment we were beginning to take it all for granted.

College was where “life” was expected to begin. And so there was that “something” in the air: the breath of love — or at least the breath of the breath of love.

You never knew, but in the next class, or in the next gathering at the Union, in the next row at the football game, at the next carrel in the library, might be the someone you would see for the first time, or as if for the first time (while choirs sang you a love song), and if your eyes but met, and met again the same way another day, and another day after that, you might soon be singing your own song of joy.

Gary Scott and Ann Peters learned love, I would like to think. Ann and Gary in this picture are a couple; they had that unmistakable “mark” almost from the beginning, I recall. They were best friends. They married soon after college.

And I? Oh, I loved too, in my way. But I loved most comfortably through my camera, which I used both as an approach to love and ultimately as shield from it. I fell in love with what I could see and was suspicious of anything deeper.

For me love was a woman’s face, a woman’s beauty, a woman’s mystery, and I used my camera as both telescope and microscope to bring those things into clearer view. I didn’t want to possess them — to apply the possessive “mine” — so much as I wanted, through the act of photographing, merely to have found them. It was all a learning experience.

I keep returning to the photograph of my girlfriend Elsie Holler and me on the Woodlawn Hall fireplace hearth. Come on now, isn’t that a handsome couple? One night there in the old Woodlawn lobby — back when it was partitioned into dating cubicles, those three-sided places for conversation and the regular patrols by the housemother to see if we were keeping both feet on the floor at all times — one night I brought to that lobby a shimmery recording of George Shearing with strings.

It was Velvet Carpet, probably the most romantic album ever recorded, and on our own small carpeted square Elsie and I slow-danced through the night, feet scarcely moving. Others passed, or paused in amazement to see such a lovely thing, and one of them was Woodlawn’s housemother, who I thought must have been moved to tolerance by her own sweet memories.

Beyond the music, beyond embrace, I was watching us, too, half disbelieving, even for the proof of our pounding hearts, that anything so beautiful could be happening. For that special night all those years ago I thank Elsie. I hope she remembers it, too. But if she doesn’t, well, I’d just as soon not know.

VAULTED JEWELS

The girls’ dorms. Ah, weren’t they the lockboxes of mysteries! Within them, beyond our vision, was a secret society we men could only guess at, populated by female humans we knew were both different from us and unfathomable almost beyond trying.

As we passed by under their windows — tiptoeing on good manners sometimes as if our comportment was being judged from behind the blinds — we could only wonder at what we could not know.

Oh, during the day, yes, they were nearly as free as we were; we met on the walks and in the classes, and they might yield a little to our fascination. But they always had at the ready words they had long been armed with and were expected to use any time they cared to: “I have to go in now.” They held trump with that; it always carried the game.

If we were deemed desirable enough (we never knew the parameters but thought it helpful to be a football player), we were sometimes allowed a formal kind of evening access. That meeting was what we called then a date.

We didn’t know about conditions elsewhere, but for better or worse a Wittenberg date in the late 1950s always came with an advertised ending point, an hour when the blade of time’s guillotine would drop, an hour when the daters were forced to part. That was because the girls had “hours.”

Going out on dates involved a wondrous process called signing out, now long forgotten. To fathom this strange signing-out, you must know, or remember, that parents of daughters in those more tender years of the ’50s were transferring responsibility for their daughters’ well-being to the college.

And the college was referring that responsibility to the dorm. And the dorm was pinning that responsibility directly on the daughter. And the daughter was further saddling her date.

Thus we were all covered, one way or another, by the simple notation in the sign-out book that told, for instance, that Jane Jones had departed at 8:04 p.m. with John Smith, bound for the pep rally, with an expected return of 11:30 p.m. At least they would have known where to start the search.

But let’s say that, miraculously, a date has been granted and arranged. Nearly all required that the boy present himself at the sign-out desk at the girl's residence, there to stand with thudding heart waiting to begin doing all the wrong things in spite of all his rehearsals aimed at the contrary.

You signed out, of course — giving yourselves at least the beginnings of an alibi should it ever came to that —and with motions surprisingly strange-feeling helped her into her coat.

You said mostly the right things during the evening, were considerate enough, listened as attentively as you could, noticed some beautiful and enticing things about her, and by five minutes before closing had her back at her dormitory door.

There in the presence of others doing the same, you kissed her, if the date had gone that way, while comparing the level of your joint passion against the others’ at the door, and then watched as first the outer doors closed behind her and then the inner. Back inside.

You could imagine the buzz within, all the excited sharings within that secret society, but, alas, you would never (not ever) know them for sure.

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