A kindness remembered

A little while back, I posted the beginning of The Waste Land that calls April "the cruellest month." It's an insider joke that I might as well explain.

As the college semester here draws to a close, I've been thinking a lot of my own days as an undergraduate. I never partied and carried on the way these kids do. (Seriously). I never got drunk or did really crazy things. The wildest thing I ever did involved persuading my circle of friends to act out Julius Caesar in the amphitheater at midnight on March 15th. (Stop the insanity, I know). Actually it was a tradition that Holly and I started in high school, but it became a fun excuse to wear a toga once a year.

In college, while doing those sorts of bizarre things, one meets "interesting" people. One such individual was S.W., who will not be fully identified for purposes of avoiding a Google search. Allow me briefly to describe him: he had shaggy hair, sort of snarly, uneven teeth, and he walked around with a bit of a slump. His musical tastes included lots and lots of Mariah Carey and soft rock in general. His physical description may slightly evoke the picture of a caveman, which is not entirely unfitting, but his picture of himself I think was more in the image of the "sentimental man" of feeling and long-suffering. Perhaps I should mention he was a psychology major too.

Now, he had been madly in love with a girl who overused the word "gossamer." Everything to her was freaking gauzelike: threads, webs, tissues, the sky, moon beams, etc. He and gossamer girl went out for awhile, but eventually she moved away and left poor S.W. behind. Thus, I was often the sympathetic ear that listened to long sessions on his lost "Tiger Love." (He had a poster of a Bengal tiger in his dorm room, which he would point to and say: "My love is fierce like that tiger... passionate, ferocious. Our love was a rare love. It was a Tiger Love.")

Once, perhaps in a consolatory mood, I mentioned the opening line of Eliot's: "April is the cruellest month," to which S.W. replied with strange enthusiasm: "It is the coolest month! It's my birthday month!" (So, that's the April joke. Us literature people find it more entertaining than most audiences).

But S.W. had a way of saying other silly things that add to the situational humor. For example, in choir we sang a beautiful version of "Shtiler shtiler," which I mentioned to S.W. was a gorgeous Yiddish song. He then said, "Oh yeah, the Quakers, they have really nice music."

Then there was his attempt to embarrass a group of us women after a choir performance. Several of my friends and I were talking quietly amongst ourselves in the reception hall, and we just happened to be near the Dean of the college and several of our professors. S.W. swaggered over and began talking very loudly about the "Valley of the Penises" in Mexico, which he had just learned about in Spanish class. He said it about 10 times, obnoxiously, and I could tell he was making some of my shy friends uncomfortable. So when he said "I'm going to go there someday, to the Valley of Penises!" I teased him and stopped the conversation with "Good, maybe you can get a souvenir."

Finally, a couple of years later, after graduation, when asked what he'd been up to, he claimed he had joined the Peace Corps but only stayed with the organization for a month because he had "fixed everything" in Transylvania.

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

Yet, as much as I make fun of silly S.W., the other day I did remember one very kind thing he did for me. I was terribly sick and couldn't leave my dorm room. He did go to the store, unasked, and bought me some orange juice. I remembered that yesterday when I was reading about a classmate offering to bring James Merrill a bowl of soup. I think that as much as I do occasionally use S.W. as a butt to some jokes, he did do one very nice thing for me, and I shouldn't forget that important kindness. We should always remember others' acts of generosity.