The tent poles hung perpendicular to the ground, looped around the air and staked into the wet earth still recovering from last night’s torrents. Green painted metal, spaced along the grass’ edge in distant sequence portending a certain exclusion. He came to sit, he came with book and phone and computer and notepad, all manner of distractions, to spend an afternoon of it, all but amazed that no one else in this collegiate sphere had come to do same. How many passing students, eager to show some skin to the warming sun, eager to free toes and dorm-whitened arms and knees to the world, looking disdainfully past the sprawling undergraduate lawn yet making surprising use of the benches, the stone tabled surfaces so unwelcoming to their class-honed rumps. He settles down ‘neath a tree, planing his jeans in the still soggy soil, feeling the slight infusion of moisture like a bonding of the Earth to its progeny, like a homecoming, like a return to the place that one should always be.
It is warm. For once, it is warm and sunny and there is no tropical storm or swirling snow or gusty wind onrushing to sweep the people of the world inside, away, undercover.
It is almost impossible to believe the singularity of this decision. A collegiate lawn, the very stuff of brochure and pamphlet and lyrical sonnet, bereft of human companionship save this one bewildered man, years out from his own youth and somehow feeling very much the youngest of them all. Surely not all are wearing designer brands unworthy of a little introduction to ants, beetles, soft green stains? Surely not all are in transit to another obligation, another deadline, another gathering under the high fluorescents of steady drone? And yet perhaps it only takes a precedent, a trendsetter, someone to make it okay or inspire the idea. Even on this coast, surely not all are sufficiently repressed to reject the casual suggestion of what should only be obvious on the breakout day of spring. To laze, to lounge, to read and even type under the shade of infant blossoms just starting to emerge and take up a position on the state of the reborn world.
They came in their orange truck, a glorified golf cart, they came with lengths of rope and little plastic signage, they came with a sense of tired purpose that comes with contract labor at the end of an afternoon. They came to give meaning to the empty hook-looped green stakes, all but blending in with the verdant Renaissance they adorned, to draw long white lines in perpendicular contrast at waist-height and enclose the man in his peaceful reverie. They unraveled so much rope, so much string, they walked slowly and deliberately and looked away when the latter sought eye contact, afraid to even beg the question of denial of such justice to an exceptional April afternoon. And then the lift, the ties, the effortless knots the product of so many weeks or months in the Boy Scouts and one can see the man in particular, a lifetime ago, struggling in some attic room with a chiding older brother and his indifferent comic books as he tries once, twice, forty-six times to emulate the confusing monochrome sketch diagram of the particular tie he needs to master for the badge that appears the most pivotal rung on a ladder up to oblivion. How he never could have envisioned himself here astride a storied lawn on a bustling campus one April afternoon envying another of indeterminate age as he read and talked on a headset and seemed to reflect the grand randomness of it all, bucking the trend, as he remembered the gloried colors of that patch of cloth and the pat on his head he received from his father and how the world would never be this simple again.
Stringing, stringing, taking their time, getting each connection with each loop just so with a sufficient tautness to ward those who might duck or jump or doubt the seriousness of the effort herein engaged. And lastly the signs, just before twilight, plastic warnings in high-contrast English to ward those who would otherwise be inclined to feel a lawn is for enjoying, for contemplation, for an appreciation of the soft rolling Earth and its gentle carriage of all of us through the vast coldness of space.
Guitarists arrive as the orange truck is loaded and departs, they perform only for each other, one old, one young, perhaps two generations from the same branch but more likely and fittingly old buddies, a friend of the father perhaps, or men who met in a coffee shop once when they were both starving and refused to sell their strings. They all but whisper their tunes, but he is in just enough to range to appreciate it without discerning or detecting a single tune, though some must be familiar or known. And somewhere in this precise space, in this gap between the familiar and the unknown, there is a solace and a peace he can make with this music despite its being music, and it lulls him back to wistfulness on his now excluded lawn as the sun slips quietly behind a building and bathes the quad in shade that is not yet exactly cold. It winks, just briefly, through an alley’s gap, between two buildings, and then slips into the gently budding night.
