To new college grads

Ten things I've learned since school

by Walter Crockett

I entered college in 1964, when the times they were a changin' -- as the advance brigades of the Baby Boom generation began their first border skirmishes with the social fabric of America.

People my age and older turned out just like their parents -- working nine to five, playing bridge, having kids as soon as they got married, trading in their cars every three years. People my age and younger grew their hair long and experimented with various substances and "lifestyles" we still don't want to tell our kids about (though we do get a certain devilish delight in revealing them to our aged parents). We set out to test just about every rule in the book -- and to our eventual shock and dismay, we found that most of the rules in the book were there for pretty good reasons.

LSD and marijuana hit the campus of Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during my freshman year. What flunked me out, however, was not the blowing of the mind, but the blossoming of the flesh, combined with a total inability to buckle down and study when there was anything less important to do.

I came back to Worcester with my tail between my legs, worked in a plastics factory for three weeks, and then hitchhiked back to Ohio just in time to find my girlfriend's neck covered with hickeys (courtesy of my best friend). But not before I had seen the Rolling Stones at Worcester Memorial Auditorium in second-row seats that cost $8.

Stop me if you've heard this before.

Five of us drove out to San Francisco together in the summer of '65 in a '56 Buick. We crossed the Rockies at five mph -- me, my former girlfriend (for whom I still ached), the guy who gave her the hickeys (she was already tired of him), the guy she really hungered for (he didn't care about her), and 16-year-old Alan (who was inspired to become a junkie after seeing Dion of Dion and the Belmonts shooting heroin in the Bronx).

When duty called me to avoid the draft, I returned to Clark University and eventually was graduated, barefoot, in 1969. By then, the cool stuff that had been going on in San Francisco in '65 was pretty much going on even in Worcester.

Alan, in case you were wondering, grew tired of being a junkie, but he found it almost impossible to quit, partly because heroin was the most beautiful experience he'd ever had and partly because he could spot a user a mile away. He finally moved to the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont and became a farmer, just to get away from the city's temptation.

I learned a bunch of things in college. For example, I learned to play bridge during final exams of my senior year. I was an English major, and I thought then and for many years afterward that my education had done absolutely nothing to prepare me for the real world. I now see that I was wrong about that. There are two real worlds, and Clark prepared me well for the better of the two.

The "real world" that cynical broken-spirited people with dead-end jobs conjure up to scare recent college graduates isn't particularly real. And there's very little world to it. It's just an immensely boring workaday maze, wallpapered in faded greenish-gray, designed to sap the marrow out of your daily dreams before it spits you out each evening into an automobile commensurate with your "real world" status, so you can drive home and watch TV with your 2.3 children and have sex with ever-declining frequency with your ever-declining spouse.

The real world my liberal-arts education prepared me for was the world of ideas and words, of imagination and possibility, of music and art, of passion and courage -- the world where people are noted for their differences and their quirks and their character, not for their cautious conformity.

You can live in both of these real worlds simultaneously -- and many people do. That's one of the things I've learned in the 29 years since I was graduated from college. I've learned a bunch of other things too, if I can just remember them.

First, I've found that there's a big difference between knowing something and knowing something. It's the difference between the map and the road. You don't get there by knowing how, you get there by putting one foot in front of the other. Over and over and over. And it's always two steps forward and one step back -- except when it's one step forward and two steps back.

Second, I've learned that women are even more wonderful than I thought they were. I had a revelation as a 19-year-old in San Francisco that the curves on the typical naked female were strikingly dissimilar to the curves on the typical Playboy bunny. This disturbed me for a while, but after I got used to it, I kind of enjoyed the variety. When the women's lib movement came along, I read a great article in the Village Voice by Vivian Gornick, who actually got it through my thick skull that our society is designed to make women feel that they were born defective and must be made acceptable by divesting themselves of large quantities of body hair, putting on makeup, wearing high heels, smoking cigarettes, starving their butts off, and doing everything possible to disguise their monthly mood swings. These days I take women as they come. It makes life much more interesting.

Third, I learned that some things are more important than sex. Not necessarily more urgent, but more important. Love, for example, and trust. I used to believe that it was possible to be in love with more than one woman. And indeed it is. It's also possible to juggle three chainsaws at the same time. But not forever.

That painful discovery led to my fourth and fifth nuggets of post-college knowledge. Jealousy is not a passion to trifle with. It runs deeper in most of us than greed, envy, gluttony, and the impulse to procrastinate. And once you break a heart, once you shatter the bonds of trust, it's almost impossible to put the pieces back together again. Some people can do it, but I certainly couldn't.

It took me one whole marriage and a bunch of relationships to discover this. Thank goodness I learned it before I went to the altar the second time. Because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have learned lesson No. 7: that it's possible to have a partner who will be a source of delight and comfort all life long (assuming that you control your tendencies to act like a jerk, that you keep on listening and learning, and that you don't let yourself turn into a big slob).

It's embarrassing for me to admit publicly, but the very best moment of each day is never generated by some episode of lust or achievement or applause or musicality. It's when I climb into bed at night and snuggle up behind the woman I love. At that moment, I am more completely happy than at any other time. Maybe that will change as the years go by. Maybe we'll get separate beds like some old couples do. But I doubt it.

Lesson No. 8 is that while it's fiercely difficult to love more than one woman at a time properly, it's a piece of cake to love as many kids as come along. I worried before we had the first one that maybe there wouldn't be enough love to go around. But kids are sort of like new computers -- they come bundled with user-friendly software that includes all the love they need, thoroughly upgradeable from year to year.

Now that I'm rambling on like a sentimental old fuddy-duddy, here's the ninth thing I've learned: you can't have too many friends, and if you live long enough even your enemies will start becoming your friends because you have so much in common. So cultivate your friends.

(Permit me now to cultivate Al Southwick, whom I misquoted two weeks ago when I was teasing him about global warming. He never said I should be wary of environmental radicals, he said I should be wary of "apocalyptic" radicals. It wasn't long ago, Southwick points out, that scientists were predicting the next ice age. And he didn't say he didn't believe in global warming, just that there wasn't proof of it. Lesson 9A: Don't tease your friends in public -- especially the ones who can read.)

There are lots of other lessons waiting out there, like -- "exercise, eat right, grab the right-of-way in Kelley Square, take chances, do the right thing, don't spit into the wind, know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, don't eat the yellow snow, don't buy anything from telemarketers, and stop watching so much TV." But most of them will hit you over the head sooner or later.

The one I've found hardest to internalize is lesson No. 10: shut up and listen.