My First Day of University

We entered doors not shown, which would be on the left side of the building.
The principal would come outside,
stand on the side of long steps and ring a hand bell.
The principle was B.O. Miller.  We called him Mr Miller.
In huddle groups beyond his hearing we might have called him B.O.

I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking that first day of university – maybe it was that things weren’t going to be that different. My mother had gone to the building I was now entering, when she was in Normal School. 

As well, my elementary school, University Demonstration School was in that building: Grade I to Grade IX. 

As children we were denied access to the whole building since the Teachers College operated on the other side of the building. But now I could go to the east side – I was in university.

The gymnasium was set up with stations, men sitting at tables. Students had forms in their hands and were rushing from one table to another, getting registered in courses before the courses filled up. I tried to feel their panic. All that happened was I got the forms filled out, initialed by the teachers and I went home to tell my dad the price of money for books and tuition.

He asked me when the deadline was. And that was about it.

Now I can’t remember much about that whole year. I took a Music Course and for the Christmas Concert we sang a Catholic Te Deum. I felt somewhat disloyal to my own faith, since the music belonged to the liturgy of another faith. I sang with only half my heart.

I took a biology course. I didn’t do biology in high school, which may have been a mistake, for I was still trying to learn phylum and genus while others were taking off into more interesting chapters of our text. Taking physics in high school wasn’t really a good grounding for biology in university. I know I took that course for I can still remember the experiment of mating fruit flies and then counting the progeny – the blue eyes vs the brown eyes.

I took the Introduction to Geology Course with the geology majors. Having a box of rock specimens and then having to name them seemed like the kind of exam I always wished I could have had but didn’t in high school. What could be so hard about that? As well, I did enjoy climbing into an old yellow bus with all of my university classmates and going on a trip to Banff to observe the trees around the cement plant at Heart Mountain or to look at a syncline in a mountain. 

A good thing I re-read this piece of writing because I wanted to add here that my dad was a geologist as was my Bishop.  Bishop Bullock must have heard from my dad that I had enrolled in geology.  I imagine now that the two of them must have shaken their heads and laughed.  One day at church the bishop stopped me and took out of his pocket a rock formation that I had been studying, multi-faceted, at least 10 faces – not precious he said, but an example of something I had been studying.  I want to say it was a garnet, but I don't think that is right.

 

I kept stone for years, in a box where I kept other precious things – like the kerchief a Hutterite girl my age gave me when I stayed over at the colony one night.  I was always  collecting precious items that I didn't know what to do with next.

Well, back to university, I kept wondering when hard work was going to begin. It never did.

Our English teacher was Dr. Guy. He introduced me to Chaucer, reading it in dialect, which was difficult to hear, but a puzzle to unravel in the text – fun. “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour.”  What is going on there, that 60 years later I can still quote the beginning lines of “The Canterbury Tales”, though I had to look up the correct spelling of most of the words. 

Dr. Guy was not the only one growing old.
Here I am, September 2020,
admiring the plums tree by Miranda's cabin.

Dr. Guy returned again to my life, just 20 years later. Rebecca signed up for an English class and he was her professor as well. 

She told him that he had taught her mother. 

He said, "I wish you hadn’t told me that. I am getting the feeling I am growing old.”

In this English class, there was a boy who sat in front of me who would write a poem about me about every other class and pass it back to me. I've always hated poetry, so I was curious but not moved. He finally asked me out on a date to go to a movie. 

We ended up at the drive inn. I didn't consider the drive inn, a movie. It was a double feature. He wanted to neck. I didn't. So he drove me home before the second feature, and he never wrote another poem to me. That's when I determined to always carry $20 with me on a date, so if I needed to call a taxi and come home on my own I could.

I took the first-year history class. 

That was a mistake. 

I failed the final exam and had to do a re-write, which ruined my whole summer, killed my love of history and didn’t advance the fact that while I read and re-read the book, I never learned how to read a quote and then “Discuss.”

How to do that?  Discuss. I learned that technique much later.

A popular sport for university students was to see how many of them could be piled into a Volkswagen for example. Then a picture of that would appear in The Herald. One day someone grabbed me as I was walking by the telephone booth and said, “We are trying to see how many people we can cram into a telephone booth and make a record.” I have no idea why the memory of that is still so vivid – perhaps I can still remember the crush of so many bodies, or the combined heat that was generated there. Well, that made me laugh!

I hope my grandchildren will have equally happy and few cringe-worthy memories of their undergraduate years.

Arta