May, 2000

This will be a short essay because it's a short week: the week between the last exam and commencement day.

Relieved of some overdue books, I wandered back to work this afternoon over the brick paths on Polk Place. The sprinklers went on for a few seconds and then faded off. Some of my steps were over shiny, slick bricks where the water had played, and some were dry. That's the way our steps are, sometimes over clean, smooth places and sometimes over rough. Carolina is experiencing that pattern now - we'll have a dry spell here for a while with the heat of the summer coming on and our Provost hail and farewell and the new Chancellor not due until August. But then things will liven up quite a bit and we'll have slippery, lovely bricks to step on with lots of work and things to do.

The campus is still and quiet. If you walk across Cameron Avenue and look left and right, the few autos you see are from the Physical Plant. The campus buildings we have always with us, and they never cease to need care. And of course, the caretakers are making sure that we have a smooth commencement, clean grounds and a working loudspeaker system in Kenan Stadium this Sunday.

They were clipping the bushes in front of the Mary Ann Smith building when I passed there. Rounded hedges make it look a little less forlorn and deserted. It's due for a refurbishing and will get one, if the fall bond issue passes. (How many times since 1901 when the building was built, have alumni said that? Well, it bears repeating.)

No students mill in front of Lenoir, as they often do; no faculty members meet in faculty sessions, as they often do; no lines string down the sidewalks for basketball tickets or follow the hills around the stadium leading to the football game. The campus is peaceful and lonely and left to the librarians and gardeners who meet their daily quota of hours no matter the season.

Not really hot yet--it will be. Not really summer yet--it will be. No school at present--soon.

We'll pass through commencement with the same vigor and tired feet we have since the first one in 1799. We won't smoke the old peace pipe in front of the Davie Poplar, we won't "cheer the buildings" or tip our hats to the Caldwell monument, as they did in the early commencements. But the ghosts of the visitors who came to see the first students graduate will mingle with our living parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles and in the song of the greetings flung to friends for the last time, old classmates will turn to a new fate.

Summer school will begin…and end…The heat of the still air will close our minds to all but a cool retreat. July passes quickly and August so slowly.

Yet the brick walks begin to feel the steps of the children, following so many before them. Till recently high school seniors, they make their way around the stone walls, their parents sometimes following holding maps. They have come to be instructed, and this summer, for them, is a grand, new beginning…the time of their lives. The heat bothers them not in the least. They are immune. Their ranks swell, their fervor increases.

Those of us who will have rested in the quiet of the town of Chapel Hill for the summer months, will turn a half-opened eye to their energy and presence. But slowly they wake us and we contract their spirit. The class of 2004 will have come to rouse us and stand us upright. They lead forward and the faculty, administrators and staff struggle to keep up. It has always been so and will always be. Let's be sure we give them a good run for their money, a contrived exposure to the old questions and the intellectual weapons to test new answers; a preparation for the outside world in an inner sanctum. The patter of their feet is a clarion call. They herald the new year, the new century and the new millenium.

We sleep now. But the fall semester is a mere ice-cream cone away.

On an afternoon last week I pushed open the heavy door of Wilson Library and stepped out onto the porch leaving the dim interior behind. The three o'clock class bell had just brought forth a swarm of students who crossed the walks of Polk Place, rather as if a movie director had given them a cue for my benefit. That time of the afternoon is the best time to see the view, if the day is sunny. The light from the west hits the door of Bingham Hall and makes it shine as if the very light of learning was beaming straight at it. The white door becomes yellow in the sun and the windows sparkle.

Students lay in the cold grass of the autumn, sleepy after a sleepless night and a day of class. They flooded north and south on the brick paths. Some of them seemed as busy with their route as the squirrels that skipped over the stones and roots of the lawn. Some seemed not to know they were fast working through one of the most important days of their lives…a Carolina day when they were free to listen and learn and sleep under the branches of the great trees on the same lawn across which Polk gazed. Do they know they are the hope of the future? I don't think so, with few exceptions. They will, though…when they come back to campus one fall day and take a deep look at South Building in the distance, columns pink in the afternoon light, and finally realize it is they and the students they see before them who constitute our salvation and our future.

I stood a moment transfixed at the sight of students in motion, of rose-colored buildings, of columns rising above a green expanse. The branches of the trees over the swell of the lawn are taking on the shape of winter; stricken, bare, golden sticks making woven covers on an azure blue book.

As I walked on toward my office, I passed by Old and New West. Cubed cupolas sit atop each old dormitory. Do the spirits of past Carolina students whisper to each other at night from the glassy windows…fly their gossip and laughter between the golden building blocks? Has any living soul ever been up there? I wonder who? If no one else goes, should that be the job of illustrious chancellors…to trod each stair on campus which climbs above the rest of the landscape…to see what's out there? I only know I've never yet seen a chancellor atop Old West. They should go there sometimes to think and pause and peruse an old book of stories about the Hill. Give them some ideas about where we've been and where we're going.

As for me, I'm going back to work. Carolina has given me many homes. She gave me my old dorm room in Connor, she has given me four office homes and with the money I earn from my work here, she gives me my private home. She gives all of us many homes. We should all climb up to the cupolas of Old West and East. We should give Carolina a thought now and then; send her a well wish; come back to the Davie Poplar and the stone fences. Our lives were built here…our adult lives. Keep memory of Carolina close to home and heart.

When I joined the crowd of answer seekers after the College Lights Lecture of Dr. Dirk Frankenberg of the Marine Sciences Department this past February (99), I asked him if there was book which described how North Carolina looked in the primeval past. He gave me the name North Carolina: The Years Before Man, A Geologic History, by Fred Beyer. I found this book in the North Carolina Collection of Wilson Library but have been disappointed to find that the scientific terminology has defeated me. I have nevertheless received a lesson. The Paleozoic Era was studded by the Cambrian Period, the Ordovician Period, the Silurian Period, the Devonian Period, the Mississippian Period, the Pennsylvanian Period and the Permian Period. These are recent eras in geologic time, from 570 million to 245 million years ago. Things are really old here on earth. Those were the days when the stromatolite algae flourished and the emeralds were formed. The boiling mass of molten lava, thousands of miles deep to the core of the earth, made hobby horse riders of the thin, solid plates above and so they moved, back and forth, creating seas and valleys and rifts and volcanoes. Our state, its arbitrary borders drawn by modern men and women, is enmeshed in this ancient puzzle, Zeus' organic orb. When next I enjoy the sight of the tall, ornamental grasses blowing skyward in the Arboretum or the dark, grey rocks on the walls around campus, I'll give another thought to the soil that gave them birth....once liquid, hot lava from the bowels of the earth. What better reason to think, as most people do, of any era, about their own home land, that Carolina is the center of the universe.

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