This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of a trip from my home in New Jersey to a little College in a Little Town in the center of Iowa. My father took me in our Buick Station Wagon, and we drove through the night, to my grandparents in Lansing Illinois. When I kissed my mom goodbye, I saw a tear in her eye; it was the first time I saw her cry. My grandparents accompanied us to Pella Iowa, to a little Dutch Enclave in the middle of nowhere, and as I thought of a song from my home town, “I vowed to become a man.” My father is no longer with us, and the college has changed, the town of Pella also has changed, but in a sense remains the same. The trip was memorable in that it was a journey from the Banks of the Raritan and Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, to a town which, in addition to a college, had as its call to fame a Tulip Time festival in May.
After orientation and a brief walking through the town to get my bearings, classes began. One of my first classes was Philosophy, where we read Plato’s dialogues. Little did I know then that Philosophy would become a way of life for me, and that Plato would be read and re-read over and over for 50 years. Once this rather tall lad of eighteen met a young gal, short of stature trying to read the announcements, straining her neck to get a good look at it. What did this lad do? He picked her up so she could read it better, and asked “is that better?” What did she think? She thought I was some sort of insulting jerk. After all, who would make fun of someone’s stature? Little did we each know that we would become husband and wife for the vast majority of those fifty years.
Though many things have changed in those fifty years, what I learned in that College town carried me through wherever I went, and my wife and I have been many places. The friends we made there in that little town are such lifelong friends, they might just as well be relatives. All things change and what Dame Fortune has given she can take away, but fortunately she never took away the experience of beginning college, and beginning a life long journey both spiritual and physical. I wish those today who make that journey the best, and pray that they too will enjoy their experience of becoming educated men and women. I pray that theirs will be the loving and lovely life long journey ours is and was.
I too have my story of a trip in a Borgward, dropping off a neighbor in Omaha so she could get a bus to Sioux Center, driving the last 43 miles from Des Moines myself, and settling into my 'single' as I did not think the only child could handle a roommate. The journey has been long and varied, but I too never regret my choice as it was there I learned to be a lifelong learner. I too pray that all who embark on that journey may find joy in the learning.
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