In a few days, Ill be packing for a week at the beach and you might be wondering what I will be taking along.
A lot more, as it turns out, than I did when I left my little town for the Big Time of college.
That was 40 years ago.
What I want to explore in this piece is whats happened in the interim, whats turned me into the kind of guy who cant seem to leave anything behind.
But before we go there, lets focus on Mike At Eighteen, that kid who knew nearly nothing about anything ... but was willing to learn something about everything.
Notre Dame, in the fall of 1973, was exactly one year into its great experiment, the one that involved the enrollment of women.
Can you imagine that?
For more than a century, my alma mater had been proudly an all-male bastion of Catholicism, a fact that – all these decades later – still makes me shake my head.
Ive met dozens and dozens of alums over the years, men who have become huge successes, and they look at me as if Ive been to the moon and back when I talk about what it was like to wander onto the campus that September and think nothing of seeing girls wearing cutoff jeans and halter tops, showing off their summer tans.
In that way, it wasnt that much different from high school ... well, unless you dont count the Golden Dome, a national championship-caliber football team, and classes that were so difficult that I thought seriously about chucking the whole thing after about six weeks.
I left home with two suitcases, in which Id packed a dozen T-shirts, some jeans, a dozen albums, 25 books and a lot of things like underwear and jackets and sweaters.
Oh yeah, harkening back to my first day in kindergarten, there were some school supplies tucked away in there somewhere, too. Plus a typewriter and, of course, socks.
But the thing is I had no idea what to expect, so I expected everything.
I wrote home two or three times a week, which I didnt do because I had to, but because I wanted to. Mom and Dad knew that Id be lost and alone – same as in high school – but they also knew that somewhere inside of me resided a burgeoning writer, a kid who knew how to put words together, if only for a sentence or two at a time.
So Id sit at my desk, my graduation present – an Olivetti Underwood manual typewriter – in front of me and just let it rip.
On and on Id type, releasing all kinds of who-knows-what kind of teenage angst, but in there somewhere, Id always make sure to describe what it was like to actually be a student at ND.
There was a lot of music in the air that fall, and my roommates – who had a bit of ingenuity in their hearts – commandeered one of those overhead projectors from the A/V department. With it in our room, all you had to do was lay a Rolling Stones LP on the mirrored window and, bingo, thered be the Lolling Tongue image projected on the wall.
From there, it was a simple matter of tracing the lines, painting in the correct colors and, voila, a hip (if against the rules) bit of revolutionary decor. Later on, wed add some Yes work and King Crimsons famous LP cover.
The dorm was called Dillon – as in Bob, but not spelled the same – and it was filled with free spirits, guys who didnt really care what anyone else thought.
This was the crowd I fell easily into.
Oh, and did I mention there were girls walking around in cutoff jeans and halter tops?
Back then, the ratio was 7-to-1.
Seven guys for every girl.
Do the math.
It was such a stacked deck that most of the guys I ran with didnt even bother trying to win that race.
To characterize my freshman year in college in terms of a social life would mean invoking words like monkish and desolate, but that would be misleading.
I can remember a couple of times when, walking across the South Quad from one class to another, a girl didnt veer off the paved path as if I carried a contagious disease.
Dont worry about that sort of thing, Mom would say at some point during my weekly phone calls home, which Id invariably place from the basement of the library. You just study, study, study.
As a freshman, however, I didnt know how to do that either.
So ... lets check the scorecard:
Mike at Eighteen had no social skills with the ladies, and he lacked the ability to memorize stuff just long enough to spew it back and pass a test.
One more strike and hed be gone, vomited from the craw of Notre Dame, leaving nothing behind but two useless suitcases and a typewriter.
BUT LIKE ALMOST anything else, you can always figure it. I got to know the Grateful Dead and Van Morrison, Richard Brautigan and John Updike, Salvador Dali and Nixons treachery. I participated in something called the Dillon Run, which took place on the same night that Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in what might have been the most famous tennis match of all time.
And I studied, studied, studied when, well, I wasnt.
I want to make one thing perfectly clear ... thanks, Dick.
That is that the Notre Dame campus is everything Id ever imagined, without question a place of magic and majesty and I treasure those memories.
But you know what happens after heaven ceases to hold sway?
Yep.
Mom, Id say, jaded, walking with her and Dad from Dillon to the Bookstore, its not a museum. I live here. Its just a school.
Im surprised my mother didnt wash my mouth out with soap.
What an idiot I was.
Notre Dame is a special place.
It is a big part of who I am.
And when I get back, the years roll away and the tears arent far behind.
So Im heading for the Atlantic coast (yet again) in a few days and Im always reminded of the way I left home for college, not caring about anything other than what I needed, not what I wanted.
Big difference.
So Ill probably take along a big suitcase, my boogie board, a duffel bag, backpack, my electric fan, two coolers, the XM radio, my Kindle, the transistor, sneakers and flip-flops and slippers, not mention the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle.
The way I look at it, though, is that its better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Whatever it is.
NEXT WEEK: As his beach vacation looms, Mike Dewey starts to understand why it is that he cant leave behind his Super Ball, his beat-up Yankees cap and his No. 83 ND jersey.
