What Makes an Alumnus?
AN ARTICLE REPRINTED FROM "THE DARTMOUTH" OF MARCH 4
Contributing Editor of "The Dartmouth"
IF IT COMES through 0.K., we'll have a little party on me," Bud would say.
Bud was talking about his application for admission to Middlewestern Medical School, into which he was trying to gain entrance after only three years of undergraduate work here at Dartmouth. He'd been talking about it for a semester and he'd been making all sorts of promises as to the nature of the wild jubilation that would be evidenced if and when he was accepted. "We'll flood the room with beer and sail little paper boats made out of my Physical Chem notes that'll be the day!"
When Bud became serious he'd talk about the pending decision on his application as if it were a court verdict on murder: "You know, my whole life depends on this thing—do you suppose I'll get in? Do you think grades mean everything? Do you think that letter from Dr. Jones will help?"
I wasn't very sympathetic—probably because I'd been forced to take Bud's medicine all year, so I'd answer yes or no, depending on which came to my tongue first. Living with a pre-med student is all right until he begins to imagine he's a great surgeon and that you're dying of the very disease he had read about in the med library that afternoon. That's the way Bud would act sometimes.
I remember once I was lying on the Day bed reading Swift's Tale of a Tub when I noticed Bud stirring around next to me. The next thing I knew he had fastened some very surgical looking sort of scissors clamp on one side of my Open shirtfront, and another one on the other, and was beginning to cut the hairs off my chest with a scalpel. "You have a deadly case of something-something it is," he explained to me, "and this is the only way to cure it."
Another time I went into the bathroom to wash my hands, but quickly withdrew when I found the body of a partly dissembled baby shark lying stinkingly where my toothbrush had been that morning. "I didn't have time to finish my lab work this afternoon," was the answer to that one.
It has been an ordinary occurrence to find the eyeballs of some lower vertebrate or other nicely pickled of course sitting on top of the radio. An ear, a skull, a testicle they've all come and gone we've had every organ of the axolotl's body in our room, an axolotl being a lizard like creature they give the pre-meds to cut up. Well, anyway, his admittance came by telegram three nights ago, and, following my usual custom, I opened it. I put it on his desk and went out to look for him to tell him the good news, and while I was gone he came back, saw it, and went down to the Western Union office to wire his acceptance of Middlewestern's invitation to "join the freshman class next year." I went down to the telegraph office to meet him and congratulate him, thinking all the while what an awful rat-futz there'd be in the room that night.
No MORE CRAWFISH
When I caught up to Bud, I expected him to be no more than a large smile, shouting anatomical terms at all passers by, but it wasn't anything like that. In fact, he looked sort of glum—and he didn't do much talking on the way back to the room. "At last I can sleep," I kidded him, "without fearing that I'll wake up without my appendix the next morning, and can wash my hands without getting little pieces of an axolotl's liver in my fingernails." To which I received no answer—and I certainly didn't draw a laugh.
"I'm crazy," he finally said, "I don't know what the hell I want." "What in God's name is the matter with you now?" I asked him, "For a whole semester you've talked about nothing but how much you wanted to get into Middlewestern Med School and now that you're in you walk around as if they'd taken you out of paradise and sentenced you to 101 years in the Black Hole of Calcutta." "You're right," he said, "but let's take a walk we'll get some beer and celebrate a little later."
We walked out toward the woods back of the observatory, where it was dark, but more beautiful than usual because it was such a clear night, with the stars showing through the trees heavy with the new snow that had fallen a day before. Bud was beginning to cheer up. "I won't graduate with you guys," he repeated an obvious fact as he slipped down a five foot drop onto his can. "We'll fix that," I said, following him in a similarly undignified manner, "We'll go right out to the Bema and graduate you tonight."
And we did. I stood up on the stone structure they use for commencement exercises in the Bema, and gave a little speech to Bud who was sitting in the snow in front of me where the seniors sit in June. The moonlight threw shadows that I watched as I made the presentation of imaginary honorary degrees just as I had seen President Hopkins do when my brother graduated years ago. "A lot of the seniors' kid brothers and sisters and some aunts and uncles sit on those big rocks over there," I described to him, "and it's hot as hell, and your good friend Joe just forgot how his commencement address went to the horror of mama and papa. The people up here on the platform look like a supersupreme court, with all their caps and gowns, and now you get the signal to rise and march up to get your diploma."
FULL FLEDGED GRAD
So he stood and marched up and I stopped him, after handing him a handful of snow for a sheepskin, to announce publicly that the administration had hesitated in awarding him his diploma, the reason being that his closet had never been cleaned out in the two years he had used it, and that he had thereby fostered the birth of numerous filthy insects, for which the college was not the least grateful.
He laughed at the close of the ceremony, and we started to walk out of the woods to go to town to purchase our beer. "Those lights through the trees over there are the Ripley-Woodward-Smith group, and across the street from them's the gym and over there's the library .... this is a great place, d' y' know it?" he said half to himself. All I could say was "yeah." "Guys don't know it when they're here," he said. "Some of 'em do," I told him. "I guess so," he answered, ". . . . Dartmouth Hall looks awful white just now, doesn't it." I felt sort of silly when I could only answer another "yeah."
"God. I've had fun," he said, "it's gonna be funny not coming back next fall do you think the guys will include me in when they talk about the old times twenty years from now I won't be a real alumnus, you know." I thought about what he'd been saying and then disagreed with him, "Just what the hell do you think makes an alumnus anyway?"
We went down to Tanzi's, got the beer, and went home. But we didn't raise much of a howl we turned in about midnight.
