THE WINDS OF CHANGE

Mr. Russell took me to dinner my first night back at Wesleyan.  Downtown Macon in 1962--exciting stuff!  He was eager to hear what I had done during the summer and I was eager to tell him.  He was very reticent about his own summer so I didn't press the issue.  I regaled him with tales of living in a condemned hotel with rats the size of cats, riding borrowed bikes through the tree-lined lanes of Jekyll, sitting in the sun by the pool getting a tan (and sowing the seeds of skin cancer), dancing the twist all night and then being at work at 6:30 AM to serve breakfast, seeing Ray Charles in concert, trying to make out on the beach and getting stepped on by the turtle hunters, sinking into the ocean with Al, the exterminator's son, the waitress from New York getting fired for dating a black man, falling asleep on huge bags of flour upstairs in the restaurant storeroom after a particularly decadent night of partying--nothing was left untold.  Mr. Russell was a wonderful audience for these tales as he laughed easily and seemed to think we girls were all innocents in spite of our twisting the night away.  As I look back on that summer I realize how innocent we Wesleyan girls really were.  It was my last summer of innocence, however, as everything in my life was about to change.

At the end of my junior year my beloved roommate, Linda, would marry and move away.  Two days before her wedding our close friend, Elizabeth, would have her nuptials and move to New York City.  Our friend, Ann, would graduate and we would never see her again.  My mother would go to New York and take my brother Jim with her.  Our brilliant director, Mr. Russell, would be fired for reasons never made clear.  And I would be stricken with kidney stones and be unable to return to Wesleyan for my senior year.

But that night Mr. Russell and I knew nothing of what lay ahead and we ate and laughed and talked for hours.  I remember it still.

Wesleyan