====== Continued ======
I'll see you in the Fall -- copyright 2002 (completion date), (2018) first publication.
I moved to Davis that Fall, into a place with two friends
from my junior college. Classes
continued to demand ever more of my energies.
Life improved now that I was a Davis local. My circle of friends expanded, and, in an
interesting twist, I found myself emerging as a leader among them–in
classes, in social settings, and in
academic organizations.
I felt honored and happy that my friends sought me out as
their confidant; their spokesperson; and often as their ‘prime mover.’ I’d been a leader many times in my life, but
this was the most significant-feeling of any in my life as it felt more
hard-won, and more freely bestowed upon me.
Bailey and I saw little of each other, but when we did, we
were always happy to do so. It was never
a long visit; just short moments of catching each other as we crossed the quad
or stood in line at the union. But,
Bailey, too, had found her stride with our classmates. She, too, was a leader, perhaps even more so
than I. That was no surprise to me,
considering what a free-thinker she was.
I learned she’d been invited to join Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor
society. Thor was also there, and they
were leading the group together.
They made a great team, though I had to laugh at the
incredibly distinct difference between the two of them. He was as straight-laced and conservative as
they come. Thor would have been
completely at home in an Ivy league setting as terse and conservative as Harvard,
or accepted on sight for a job at IBM.
He was as ‘right’ as Bailey was ‘left.’
Nonetheless, they were also kindred spirits inasmuch as they both were
completely open and guileless, with no hint of private agendas, nor of
prejudice.
When we–my classmates and I--gathered these days, the
gatherings grew ever larger, as we connected and networked, shared ideas and
got to know one another. It was an
exciting thing to be a part of. The
Davis College of Engineering was not a small college–possibly as many as 1,800
to 2,000 students, I might recall.
Friday nights at The Pub, on campus, was one of the best
nights of the week. If you arrived there
early enough, you could get a spot on the terrace, and enjoy the crisp Fall
evenings, and watch the inevitable Friday night band tune up as the stars came
out in the sky. Often, Bailey and Liz
were there, though they weren’t yet 21.
I tried to take some of those opportunities to have a seat with them,
and to catch up with Bailey, and get to know Liz a bit better. She and I never managed to become friends,
really, but we did get to a level of understanding, finally.
As Winter break and the holidays approached, there were
fewer gatherings at The Pub. The cold
and frost chased the patrons inside, allowing fewer people there
comfortably. There was a last big
‘hurrah’ there before we all left campus for the break, but Winter quarter
found the pub empty most evenings. I did
get a brief visit with Bailey that night, to wish her happy holidays, and we
sat packed into a booth with some other friends, and toasted for no particular
reason.
“It’s freakin’ cold tonight,” somebody said, in less than
eloquent fashion, and we all agreed. I
noticed that Bailey had gotten served a beer with a nearly all purple coaster,
and she pronounced it, ‘cool.’
“To Purple,” she said, and I thought she had a slight buzz,
because I didn’t think she’d toast a toast–even to purple–if she weren’t.
“To the gentle days of Fall,” I replied in a second toast,
and clinked her glass and the glasses of the others, and drank.
In late March, I began thinking what all smart students who
want to move to a new rental home in the Fall began thinking about: finding a
Fall rental. I was not entirely happy
with my roommates, though I loved them; they were my friends. Nonetheless, I thought maybe it was time to
live by myself, so I began looking for a small 1 bedroom house in
downtown. I hoped to find one for no
more than $600 per month, and hopefully, one right next to the campus.
What I found was a huge, old, one-(tiny)-bedroom victorian
on Second Street, not even fifty yards from campus. It was perfect, except for the $700 per month
price tag. I jumped on it, though I
couldn’t figure out how I’d pay the rent.
My current share was about $375 per month. The rental agency was so impressed with my
resume and my professionalism (that was the edge my age gave me) they decided
to rent the place to me.
As I went to pay the deposit, I got cold feet. I stood outside the rental agency in a March
deluge, letting my back and feet become soaked, and considered. I knew I could renew the lease at the current
place. Mary, one of my roomies, was
graduating, and Julie was apparently thinking about moving back to Sacramento
and doing the commute. She was already
working for the State in downtown Sac. I
decided to stay put, and to find new roommates.
However, not wanting to let such a great opportunity go completely
unused, and also wanting to redeem myself with the rental agency, I phoned
Bailey and asked her if she was thinking of moving in the Fall. She was, and I thought that this place suited
her perfectly.
I connected her and the agency, and after she and Liz looked
at it, they decided they could make it work as a shared place, and they signed
a lease. Bailey appreciated it. I visited her once after they got moved in,
and it seemed quite comfortable.
It seemed that Bailey began being seen around campus with a
particular boy in late spring. I finally
met him. His name was Matt, and I could
see Bailey was very happy with him, and he with her. When I finally got to ask her about him, I
found out that he was a liberal studies major, which was not a surprise. I couldn’t picture her with any of our
classmates. I was happy to see a
blossoming romance for Bailey, and it seemed a solid one, too.
Summer flew by. I was
elected President of a large engineering student organization in June, just
before the end of school. The first
order of business was to attend the National convention in Pittsburgh, along
with three of my officers, to represent our chapter. Upon my return, I found I had several phone
calls from engineering firms responding to my resumes and wanting to offer me a
job. I accepted the one with the Federal
Government. It would require me to work
during the school year, too, but it was worth the extra time demands it would
place upon me.
Bailey was back in Maine during the last part of the
summer–I knew this because I often bumped into her at the video store or the
grocery store, or at the Farmer’s Market.
She never forgot to tell me how much she liked the house (which they’d
been able to move into early as it had been vacant). She promised to find me when she was back,
in the Fall.
Phyllis and I were inseparable. She and I spent almost every weekend at
Northstar Ski Resort on our mountain bikes.
We were downhill junkies. I think
we liked the escape from the Davis heat almost as much as the actual mountain
biking. It gave us an excuse to have a
beer and enjoy the cool sierra evenings; evenings which reminded me of those
temperate evenings at The Pub.
 |
| A "Just Won my First Downhill Mountain Bike Race" younger me of late Summer, 1994. I was at my mom's house, with her doggie Amber, and Mum took the photo. |
At the beginning of Fall quarter, it seemed we all felt
robust and ready to tackle our senior year and all that it held. Goli and Elizabeth, two of my friends who’d
been President and Vice-President of the organization the year before I’d
become an officer, had gone on to become the Presidents of the Aeronautics
Engineering and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering student
chapters on the campus. I proposed to
them that this year, as my organization was preparing it’s annual ski trip, we
ought to join efforts and invite any member of the four primary engineering
clubs as long as they were current members.
They loved the idea, and pitched it to their organizations
before I could get a weigh-in from my twenty officers. I had committed us. Thus it became my job to find a large
vacation rental in Tahoe. Initially, I
figured to try for a place that could accommodate twenty-five, and thought
maybe we could push it to thirty. In my
heart, I knew that we’d be able to sell over a hundred spots, if only we had a
place that size.
My efforts were rewarded.
In Sunset Magazine–a brainstorm of an idea after a lot of other
searching–was a listing for a place on South Shore that had one main house that
slept 75 people, and had an additional bunkhouse for 12, plus a second home
which accommodated another 12. I booked
the place immediately. We were up to 99
spots.
Throughout late November and early December, our three clubs
manned a table on weekday mornings in the lobby of Bainer Hall, which was the
primary engineering classroom building.
We sold slots for the ski trip and enrolled new members in our
respective organizations. It was a
captive audience, and we had no trouble filling all the slots by the end of the
quarter.
I kept seeing Bailey pass through the lobby, and she stopped
to chat a few times. I knew she
skied. If she hadn’t, we may never have
gotten to know each other. But, when I
asked, I think she said she was hoping to have a quiet Christmas with her
family. And, I thought perhaps Matt
wasn’t a skier. She mentioned they were
living together in the house she also still shared with Liz. I’d miss seeing her on our trip. Somebody else told me she and Matt were
talking about marriage.
The trip was scheduled for the first weekend in
January. That was the beginning of the
Winter quarter. It seemed that, for the
first time in several years, winter would herald only good times with good
friends. I’d opted to take the winter
quarter off so I could work 40 hours a week at my job. In this arrangement, I would only be on
campus for the weekly meetings of my organization.
The trip was a great success. We had perhaps a total of 110 people, and we
stayed two nights and three days. When
it was all over with, we got every penny of our deposit back. All $1,000 of it. I became friends with many people who were
merely acquaintances to me before the trip.
But I wished Bailey had been there, too.
It would have been the first time I’d spent some real time with her.
Winter quarter waxed on, and I missed out on much of the
news and goings on at school. I did get
the news that Bailey had had open heart surgery just after Christmas, and was
late returning to school. I was sad not
to have known, but the news of her recovery buffered my sorrow and a pang of
guilt that stabbed through me on hearing the information. I also realized that if she’d meant me to
know, I would have. I still hadn’t seen
Bailey by the end of January, but was happy to hear from Phyllis that she was
back at school.
The phone call in early March, telling me that Bailey had
died of a stroke, was one I’ve not been able to fully remember until now, as I
write. Of all the people I knew on
campus, nobody had remembered to tell me. I was hearing this news days late, and the
call was from an advisor who knew that Bailey and I had been close. Now, I remember thanking her, and hanging
up. I remember hearing the memory of
Bailey’s story about the scar, and I remember the fearful feeling I’d felt for
her that day in my spare bedroom. I was
standing in my kitchen, looking out the window at a downpour, and at the barren
trees of our neighborhood. It seemed
this day had tailored itself to the news I’d just received.
The memorial for Bailey began with a procession that started
at the house she’d occupied with Liz and Matt.
It ended at the Arboretum, and it was there that I joined the
group. It was such a cold day that
everybody present was in heavy coats. As
I entered the hall there, the rain was still pouring down. It had not let up since before I’d first been
told of Bailey’s passing.
I couldn’t speak, and I could see that of all of us who were
there, even those who were ordinarily eloquent were lost. Mostly, the hundred or so in attendance
listened quietly as her family spoke, and gathered details to fill in the final
picture of the young woman we’d known. I
met some of her family, and learned, finally, how she came to be such an
amazing soul. Liz was there, of course,
next to Matt, and I went to her and gave her a hug, though we didn’t speak to
each other. There seemed little we could
say.
I thought of the ways that Bailey and I had wound through
each others’ lives. I remembered the
feelings I’d harbored in my heart before I knew her, and I understood then, as
clearly as any time, that she’d been on my horizon at precisely the right time,
in the right season. We had revolved
around each other’s lives as the seasons revolve in all our lives.
I did not credit her for fixing what wasn’t quite working in
me–she wouldn’t have wanted that credit; it was false. I had done that myself. But Bailey was herself with me, and met I had
her when I needed that most. She was
honest with me, and she reminded me that I could be that way too. For me, that was Bailey’s legacy.
My advisor, the one who made the call to me that day, asked
me to write something about Bailey for the newsletter. I was again touched by the reality that few
had known such a sweet soul. I did my
best, though neither did I know as much as I now wished I had about my friend
Bailey. Mostly, I tried not to write
false information, or make assumptions, because that would have bothered
Bailey, I knew. I tried to describe the
richness with which Bailey seemed have lived her life. And, I tried to expose the tenderness which
had been my experience of Bailey.
I wrote of the richness of the seasons, and how each is
distinct. I remembered the Fall, and how
every Fall at Davis had been poignant, and more so once I’d come to know
Bailey. Always, thoughts of Fall bring
images of the turning of the leaves, and how the last days of the leaves are
also the most beautiful. We hadn’t known
that Bailey’s last days were to be her last, yet they were as beautiful as any
I’d known, and she’d helped make that so.
 |
| "To Purple!" |
Comments