She Sells Sea Shells

My library research so far has involved (1) fires, (2) doctors, and (3) mussels. I've related some anecdotes about fires, and a history of doctors revealed some nifty ones, included one of the pioneer women doctors of the US. Mussels are freshwater clams, found in the Ohio River (along with crawdads, also known as crayfish, which you might say are freshwater lobsters. We have our ersatz imitations out here in the provinces.) This town had a thriving industry of making buttons from mussel shells in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

My local comrades and I have started a meeting at Cragmont College, and it's caused me to reflect on my early days there. I was such a scared, immature kid who tried to cover up his fear by being brash and mouthy -- more or less, I suppose. Perhaps I really wasn't that bad, just a silly, fraudulent kid.

A fellow freshman made the dean's list the first semester I was there; he was on probation at the end of the Spring term. He was kicked out the next year. Booze. Wonder whatever happened to him.

In the eighties, I met an alcoholism counselor, Nan, who'd been in my class at Cragmont. She told me she was a recovering alcoholic, in AA. She happened to be from the same town as the aforementioned guy, a progressive town in northern Indiana. She told me about driving out with a classmate of mine, Ken, while we were students and the two of them got rip-roaring drunk in his car. They were both "pinned," but to different sweethearts. Ken is still married to the girl he "pinned" in college. Nan was still married to her frat pin man too, only her husband was an alcoholic, "practicing," as they say, and she was unhappy about that. (Ironic, that word "practicing," in his case, because he's a doctor of medicine.)

When she told me about getting drunk with Ken way back then I had a longing to go back to that time and be mature enough to -- drink with a coed that I was friends with! And to have been mature enough to be pinned to the person I was going to marry! Even while this woman colleague of mine was telling me that we were peers now in alcoholism. She had been on a pedestal while I was in college, so far above me ... That was then, and this was now, our retrospective, and by her admission we were not so far apart in maturity, but ... They say that some of us are "egomaniacs with inferiority complexes." I can't explain it. A writer in residence at Indiana University, Alyce Miller, has a volume of short stories called "The Nature of Longing." It's a worthy topic, and good luck to anybody who can explore it. Life is a mystery to be lived, rather than a problem to be solved, someone said.

Gentlemen -- goodnight.