I live in the same town where I went to college.  Whenever I want to revisit my youth – and simultaneously feel its loss – all I have to do is stroll through campus on my way to work.  Of course, my walks through campus aren’t entirely recreational these days.  But mostly I take the bus, reserving the full stroll across the quad for mornings when I’m not in a hurry and need either the exercise or the meditation.

Last Friday I needed both.  My neurologist had recommended I switch to a new anti-convulsant, since neither my symptoms nor the current drug’s side effects are “where we’d like them to be,” and also confirmed that my driving privileges aren’t being restored anytime soon (I’m becoming a dreadful backseat driver – I worry that my family may install a passenger-side ejector seat, a la James Bond’s car in Goldfinger, if I don’t learn to shut my yap).  It was a deep overcast morning, with a chill that augured the onset of fall.  I headed out of my neighborhood, which after a few blocks gives way to ramshackle student rentals, rich-kid condos and stately sororities.  A couple emerged from a scarred doorway of one house, a boy and a girl implausibly young for college.  He started his Vespa in the bare front yard and motioned her to get on.  Shyly she climbed astride, and they purred off into the drizzle, the feelings on their faces as fragile as their unhelmeted skulls.

The rain thickened as I traversed the quad towards the bronze statue of Robert Frost, life-size, in a seated pose with suspenders, open collar, and a poised writing easel, looking into the middle distance on the verge of a Great Thought.  Close by was a boy who peered out at the morning student rush in undisguised misery, sitting as near as possible to the Frost effigy without touching it, like a baby Rhesus Monkey in an experimental psych lab trying to derive comfort from a cloth mother that delivers nothing but random electric shocks.  “College was supposed to be where it gets BETTER!” he seemed silently to scream.  I motored past, thinking, “Don’t worry, it does get better.  Just not right away.”  Beyond lay the path to Varsity Pond, where box turtles and sophomores sun themselves in good weather, now full of oncoming faces that were mostly worried or opaque, lost in worlds of tests yet untaken, friends yet unfound, lives yet unlived.  A college campus on a rainy morning, three weeks into the year.

Past the pond, the city resumed, and the adults seemed no happier.  A twentysomething in a Toyota Tantrum LX honked at the indignity of having to stop behind a public bus.  Other drivers gunned ahead, getting crossly on with their day.  Instead of the comfort of Frost, I found myself sliding into the blues of William Blake:

I walk down every chartered street
Where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

But as I approached my office on Pearl, there appeared the antidote it all: an East Indian man in a wheelchair, swaddled in a sodden blanket, legs wrapped in surgical tape, propelling himself up the rainy sidewalk with swollen, bare feet.  He looked at me with the most beatific smile, wishing me good morning.  I offered him no help for his journey other than to greet him back with all the joy I could muster.  A moment later, I heard a voice call my name.  I turned to see our friend and gifted music teacher Carolyn Meyer, blowing me a kiss from her unrolled window.  I finished my commute, damp from rain, and stunned by radiance upon radiance.