U-TURNS & ‘U’ ‘T’

Thirty-two summers ago, with the ink still wet on my diploma from Duncan (Okla.) High School, I headed south in my mom’s 1971 Ford Club Wagon for orientation weekend at the University of Texas at Austin.

I was college bound! Sort of!

Just 15 miles into the 300-mile trip, I pulled to the side of the road and stopped the van. It was an unconscious act which I completed almost before I realized I was doing it. But it was there, on the grassy shoulder of Highway 81 South, that the gravity of my situation revealed itself to me.

What the hell am I doing? I can’t do this! I don’t know anything about Austin. I don’t know anyone in Austin. I’m going home.

Before I could execute a U-turn back to Duncan and my house and everything I knew in the world, I had a vision. And not the good kind. In this vision, I was – for all eternity – breaking the news to my dad that I would not be attending college.

I made it the rest of the way to Austin without incident. Which is not to say that I made it to the UT campus without incident. There were many incidents.

For starters, I couldn’t’ find it. I couldn’t find UT. I couldn’t find one of America’s largest college campuses, a mini-city of 50,000 students built around a 70,000-seat football stadium.

I’ll put it this way. Driving through Austin and not finding UT is like driving through California and not finding the ocean.

So, several blocks past the ocean, I pulled into a 7-11 for directions.

Excuse me? Ma’am? Could you tell me where UT is?

I was careful to say the letters “U” and “T” very slowly, pausing between each letter, in case she was unfamiliar with the term. The clerk – a matronly and kind-hearted woman – said just four words in response.

“Oh, you poor thing.”

With that, she came out from behind the counter, put her arm around my waist, and guided me out the door to the parking lot. Then she turned me around and pointed just above the store’s roof.

There, rising above the surrounding buildings and treetops was the university’s 31-story clock tower.

Golly!

Things did not get immediately better. I do not have space to list them all here, but here are some bullet-point highlights:

·         For the 72-hour junket, I brought three suitcases, my jam box, and a basketball.

·         During my 2-hour quest for UT, much of which was on foot, I carried all of these belongings with me. In Austin. In the summer.

·         Because it was my First Day At College, I wore new jeans and a long-sleeved shirt for the occasion. In Austin. In summer.

Golly! It sure is hot here at U(pause)T!

Heat notwithstanding, it was the milk that nearly did me in. After finally locating the dorm playing host to the orientation (There sure are a whole buncha buildings here at U(pause)T!), I made my way to the cafeteria for lunch. As a four-year veteran of the Duncan High School cafeteria (– motto: Don’t worry, kids! You won’t be dorks forever! Maybe! – I was sure I was in my comfort zone.

I could not have been more wrong.

Seeing as how I was a Good Kid and it was my First Day At College, I passed on the tempting lineup of sugary soft drinks available at the beverage station and made a dutiful beeline for some wholesome, healthy milk.

I found the milk easily enough; it was obviously in the large stainless steel case labeled “Milk.” But getting the milk out of it was another issue entirely. You see, back at dear old DHS, milk was conveniently stored in teeny-tiny cardboard containers and the only challenge in accessing the milk was peeling open the paper spout.

But this damnable milk monolith was another thing entirely. I approached it with all the confidence of a child tiptoeing to the end of the high dive for the first time.

Golly?

On the front of the box were two metal plates. Above each plate, there was a white spout emerging from inside the box. Assuming the device functioned like a soda fountain, I pressed my glass up against one of the metal plates.

Nothing happened.

I stepped back, re-evaluated my situation, and tried again.

Press. Nothing. Press. Still nothing. Unless my neck and ears getting really hot counted as something. If so, then it was definitely not nothing.

What the hell is going on here?

I looked more closely and saw metal knobs extending from the box, directly above each metal plate. Perhaps they had something to do with the process. Gingerly, I grabbed one of them and pushed. Nothing. I turned it – or at least tried to. It didn’t budge. Still nothing.

Gah!! I was right all along! I can’t do this! I can’t even get milk! “Got milk?” Not me! I’ll never have milk! I’m going home.

Just then, a really cute girl – a girl who had probably driven straight to UT with no trouble (or pauses), who was probably born at UT and had her first glass of milk in this very cafeteria – walked up, placed her glass against the metal plate, lifted the metal knob, and got milk.

After a brief, but intense, period of misdirected rage at the girl, I took a deep breath and got my milk. I then proceeded to eat alone for the first time in my life – at least the first time I’d eaten alone against my will. I was surrounded by hundreds, possibly thousands, of kids and I don’t think I’d ever felt so isolated.

I left the cafeteria demoralized and defeated. The dorm’s cavernous atrium, which had so dazzled me that morning, now made me feel small and lost. The heat and lines and bigness and weight of U(pause)T had me, for the second time in two days, reconsidering the idea of going to college.

I spent most of the afternoon on the pay phone, trying to find anyone back home to talk to. I guess I sounded pretty pathetic, because the few people I reached sounded sincerely concerned. Which made me feel ridiculous. I’d been talking about going to UT my entire life. I’d applied to just one school. I need to man the fuck up and get over it.

At dinner, I got my tray, got my milk, walked up to the first table of humanoid-looking people I could find, and said, “You don’t know me, but I’m going to eat dinner with you.” And while I didn’t become best friends or anything with the four guys I dined with that evening, I did hang out with them later that night and learned that one of them was Jewish, a discovery of much greater significance to me than to him, an imbalance he finally acknowledged when he (nicely) asked me to stop asking him “so damn many questions.”

By the next day, I was a U(no pause)T veteran, drinking with new friends, laughing at inside jokes, and pulling my first all-nighter.  The next morning, I drove home in a daze, a wholly different creature from three days before.

Any time I see one of those milk dispensers these days, it makes me smile. And it reminds me that the difference between “outsider” and “insider” is really the difference between the “unknown” and the “known.” And the only way you can bridge that gap is by going forward – no U-turns allowed.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver