Brown University - Liber Brunensis Yearbook (Providence, RI)

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BROWN - 1955 Sometimes I get into what is called the reflection blues mood. It usually comes when things aren't going right, and because intro- spection is olten painlul, it is easier to glance back over times past to find myself again. Yes, the good old days always look better than the uncertainty of the future when things aren't going well. It's comfort ing to know memory has built the past into an ideal and then not care if you're fooling yourself. It builds you up. Maybe it's the real thing after all. The human mind is a funny thing. We see and know only half of what we think we see and know. The rest of it is mostly feel- ings. I was just glancing through the book and thought, Was it really like this? This is supposed to be the real thing, and yet there was so much more to it. Where are the Providence rains? Certainly they existed? Not hav- ing a raincoat was as fatal as cutting all your classes. It got to be like Noah and the Ark, and a friend once said that Rhode Island was the only place besides the Philippines where the typhoons hit. Yes, there was rain and with it came a little beauty. The smell of wet overcoats in classrooms, and outside gusty blasts ol wetness seemed to blow multicolored slickers around. Reds, yellows, and pastel shades of blue whisked by unnoticed. Not long ago sweaters with fraternity pins on- them beckoned for conversation, but that was all ended by the water

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shedding rubberoid and the rain. It even got to the point that you felt the suy who designed the quad built the tunnels just so you could get to the Ivy room without getting wet. I look at the portraits of the men in my class. Were they really like that? Well maybe on Friday afternoon before the weekend started, but that isn't how they looked the next day. We'd get back from sleeping through Saturday's classes, and then laugh at each other, eyeballs looking like the globe of the world etched in red lines, and moons under them that you could swing from. Then came the bull session when we picked up all the lost pieces of the night before. All the things that happened that you just couldn't remember and you knew why you couldn't too. But God, it was fun. A few guys had black eyes, some had terrific dates, other got blasted completely. some got bird- dogeed, and then even others studied 1nd they looked a little out of it and remorseful. Are you sure those guys in the portiaits are like they really were? Then where the devil are their exam period beards, their foul weather jackets, and the