|
I
spent some time also comparing two statues on opposite ends of the
campus, one of them showing a muscular Hercules firing an arrow
horizontally while bracing himself against some rocks, and the other
showing a rather gaunt Indian bracing himself awkwardly against some
rocks and using all his strength to fire an arrow straight up toward
the stars. I must say I preferred the second one.
|
Statue
photos taken in 1985
(at
right: the Saltine Warrior) |
 |
Other
examples of my expanded consciousness include the pleasure I've been
getting from eating (maybe that's just because the food isn't too
bad) and even the enjoyment I got out of reading your last letter.
Oh,
yes, and between dinner Monday and dinner Tuesday I attended two
2-hour classes, read three books, and got ten hours of sleep.
How's that for healthy activity? (Well, actually two of the
books were less than 50 pages long, but it sounds good.)
Saturday,
September
20, 1969
The
only problem that has arisen concerning the long walk between 139
Miles Avenue and the campus is that my feet tend to get a little
tired. It's even a little rougher on weekends, since the
cafeteria where I like to eat is apparently only open five days a
week. I had to walk an extra half-mile this noon to reach a
hamburger shop — and then another mile and a half back here to
tend to my letter-writing. Three miles of walking just so I
could eat lunch!
|
 |
The
nearest hamburger shop was Carrol's, just beyond the campus in the
rather scruffy commercial block of Marshall Street.
Photo:
Syracuse University Alumni News, Spring 1970 |
Saturday,
September
27, 1969
Tom
Thomas still hasn't grown up; he has no car, and he even still has
other people do his laundry for him. (I just got back two
weeks' worth of laundry from the cleaner's, along with a bill for
$4.70. All I have to do is walk three quarters of a mile every
fortnight with my accumulated used clothes in a bag, drop them off at
the Nottingham Dry Cleaners, and then wait for them to be cleaned and
delivered to me here so that I can put them back into my closet.
Personally, I find that's it's well worth the money.)
|
A
major issue for all students at the time was the war in Viet Nam.
Click here for that thread. |
Saturday,
October 11, 1969
Good
morning! I just had a "breakfast" here in my room
consiting of two Space Food Sticks (chocolate flavor) and a few sips
from the glass of water I keep in a drawer. Not much of a
breakfast at 82 calories, but on Saturday and Sunday it's too much
trouble to walk to a restaurant more than twice a day. I'll get
a real meal after I finish writing you and WOBC.
Wednesday,
October 22, 1969
It's
actually snowing today in Syracuse. Great big, wet flakes; no
accumulation on the ground yet, but I've heard that once it gets cold
enough for the snow to accumulate, it never melts but just keeps on
accumulating. Somebody said that Syracuse gets more snow than
any other city in the United States except Nome, Alaska. It
ought to be an interesting winter.
Monday,
January 12, 1970
It's
cold here and snowy, but I'm almost beginning to get used to
it. I'm turning into quite a mountain climber, scrambling over
those ridges of snow that the plows throw up at the intersections to
block off the sidewalks.
At
the cafeteria where I eat, an apparent new arrival from some foreign
country was going through the line ahead of me. There's a
choice among four entrees, and his lady friend chose lamb. He
thought it looked good, but he wasn't sure, so he asked the server
behind the counter, "What does lamb taste like?" Now
how would you answer that question?
|
 |
The
Link Hall of Engineering (left) and Slocum Hall (right). I
customarily ate at a cafeteria on the ground floor of Slocum.
Photo:
Syracuse University Alumni News, Spring 1970 |
Incidentally,
the food at this cafeteria is quite good, and the prices seem
reasonable. For instance, at that meal last Friday I had the
lamb, with dressing and a boiled potato and gravy over it all, a
good-sized salad, a cup of clam chowder, iced tea with lemon and
sugar, a piece of pie, and a half-pint of milk, all of which came to
$1.88. It would have been fine if the guy behind me as I
checked out hadn't asked me incredulously whether I was going to eat
"all of that." First time anyone's accused me of
eating too much. (I had a finicky appetite as a youngster.)
Saturday,
January 17, 1970
Do
you have any idea how warm a 34-degree day feels after two weeks of minus-10
to plus-15? Since yesterday afternoon, we've been having a
heat wave here in Syracuse. It actually got up to 34 this
morning. It's due to cool off again tonight and be cold and
windy tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm almost convinced that it's
spring. I don't have to bundle up so much when I go outside;
now I can get along with just hat, boots, heavy coat, and heavy
gloves, whereas when it was really winter I also had to wear earmuffs
and a scarf over my face. Today there's a very fine snow
falling which, if it were rain, would be a typical April
drizzle. Without earmuffs, I can hear birds singing as I
walk. The cars on the streets make wet noises rather than icy
noises. There's a constant dripping of water as ten-foot-long
icicles, hanging in huge masses from the edges of roofs, melt.
It's spring!
Sunday,
February 22, 1970
Mrs.
Harris, my landlady, left this afternoon on a ten-day group trip to
Israel; she'll be back March 3 to attend a wedding, and then on March
12 she goes south (Florida and D.C., one month each) to visit her two
sons and their families. So I'll be here all by myself for two
months, except for the people living in the upstairs half of this
duplex (whom I hear but almost never see). That's fine with
me. I can leave my doors open so that my room doesn't get so
cold, and I may even move the portable TV in here so I can watch it
in bed. Privacy is luxury.
Saturday,
April 25, 1970
Maybe
spring is finally beginning to diffract around that corner.
The temperature's in the sixties today, the sun is shining, and down
at the campus the fraternity/sorority types are having their
"Greek week" celebrations. When I walked down there
for lunch, there was a policeman at every corner, apparently to
protect the revelers from traffic. There were assembling
crepe-paper-covered chariots in their equivalent of Oberlin's men's
quad, while toga-wearing fellows and normally-dressed girls marched
in groups toward that area, the girls singing loudly. I guess
they were going to have a chariot race of some kind, but I didn't
stay to find out.
But
still the grass is only beginning to get green. (My parents
tell me that back in Ohio the grass is so tall that they'll have to mow
it this weekend. You probably already have mowed in your
area.) I always looked forward to the first Saturday in May
because it always seemed to be the first really pleasant summer day
— that's about the time the first dandelions bloom in Ohio —
but at the rate we're going here in this cold New York climate, I'll
have to wait until June for that sort of weather.
Friday,
May 8, 1970
The
last week in April was quite warm and pleasant, and it looked like
summer had suddenly come to stay; temperatures were near 80.
Two days ago it snowed. A quarter of an inch. The
temperature got down to 27. It's on its way back up now, but
the damage has been done: we now have had eight straight months
of snow, October through May.
Friday,
May 29, 1970
A
girl in our group has an old 1957 Cadillac coupe which she has named
"Carmichael." Why did she name it that? Well,
said another guy in our group, she probably was driving it one day
when one of her passengers said, "You'd better be careful; any
moment now, this Carmichael apse."
Sunday,
June 14, 1970
Okay,
stand up. Just stand still there for a moment. Feel your
feet pushing against the floor to hold you up? Now let your
legs relax. Your feet are no longer pushing down, so you
collapse to the floor as gravity pulls you down.
While
you're down there in a heap, consider. If the force exerted by
your feet equals your weight, you'll stand upright. If the
force is less than your weight, you'll sink to the ground. What
if the force is greater than your weight? Will you not rise
into the air?
It
seems reasonable, if you conveniently forget about the fact that the
force will cease to be effective the moment your feet leave the
ground. It seems even more reasonable to me when I'm asleep
(horizontal and dreaming).
Every
now and then I have a dream in which I'm walking along and then just
press a little harder against the sidewalk and rise a few inches into
the air, supported by the thrust coming from the bottom of my
feet. I increase the thrust a little and lean forward, and
immediately I'm effortlessly gliding down the sidewalk, not moving a
muscle, just pressing down with my feet. Did you ever have a
dream like that? Or is it only me that's crazy?
Maybe
I just spend too much time walking. My rough estimate is that
by the time I get out of here in August, I will have spent about
three weeks' worth of time doing nothing but walking, with a total
distance of nearly 2,000 miles. (That's an average of about two
round trips per day to a point a mile and a half distant.)
Saturday,
June 27, 1970
I'm
surprised that back when everyone was citing proof that Paul
McCartney was dead, no one mentioned the song "Come
Together" from the Abbey Road album. "He say,
'One and one and one is three'; got to be good-looking 'cause he's so
hard to see. 'Come together, right now, over me.'"
The invisible fourth member of the group, singing from his grave and
urging the survivors to close ranks. I don't know, maybe
somebody did mention it. Anyhow, now the situation has
changed: McCartney's alive, but the Beatles are rumored dead.
Saturday,
August 1, 1970
I
saw an interesting sign this afternoon at a dry-cleaning
establishment that's open six days a week. "We give
outstanding service (except Saturday)." Couldn't they have
worded that a little differently?
I
graduated from the master's program August 6, 1970.
Sunday,
January 2, 1971
The
air may be clear in Rochester, but that certainly wasn't the case
over in Syracuse. There were many days when it was hardly
possible to see from one side of Lake Onondaga to the other (about a
mile). Of course, on the south shore of the lake was a big
chemical plant.
The
only times the sky really looked clear were after a cold front moved
through; the precipitation washed the air, and the high-pressure air
that followed was comparatively clean at first.
|
