After the storm

My wife and I spent Friday and Saturday moving our two younger children into a summer apartment from their dorm rooms at Indiana University. They had to be out by 10 a.m. on Saturday, which also happened to be graduation day.

Almost our entire time together was stressful, not just because of traffic jams in Bloomington, but because we began packing the kids up on Friday afternoon in a downpour that didn’t stop until we could work no longer. Raincoats were useless, since the exertion created as much moisture under the waterproofing as the sky was dumping out from above. I finally gave up, took off the jacket, and let nature take its course.

When Sherri and I moved them in last August, we rented a van, loaded up all

Move-in day last August

of their belongings for the school year and got them settled in about two hours. Times being what they are, we decided to save money this weekend by skipping the van and moving them in my wife’s Honda Accord. It took all Friday afternoon and most of Saturday morning.

Already snapping at one another between trips with TVs, refrigerators and over-packed boxes, matters got worse on Saturday after our one planned outing — attendance at the Theatre Department’s production of The Tempest — fell through. Our alternative was to drive through nearby Brown County State Park, where the rolling, heavily treed landscape reminds me of  the Smokies.  That trip proved to be a relaxing, but too-brief respite.

Hungry, we drove back to into busy Bloomington for an early dinner at our favorite Greek restaurant. Those plans went into the ashcan too when we found the line was out the door and onto the sidewalk. So, we settled for supper at a dingy little Cajun place on the edge of campus. The food was good (and cheap), but not what we had counted on.

By that time, parents and kids seemed to have had enough of each other, so we said goodbye about 6 p.m., and Sherri and I drove back to our room in Brown County.

Bloomington is a picturesque  town of about 70,000 — 110,000 when you add in the student population. Unfortunately, hotels are limited, and so they take advantage of major university events to jack up room prices to ridiculous rates; even the Holiday Inn Express was $300 a night.

So, my inventive wife checked accommodations in Brown County and found a room for a third the cost at a home on T.C. Steele Road (named after the impressionist who anchored the Nashville, Ind., artist colony during the early 1900s).

In this part of Indiana you are almost as likely to encounter a jay-walking box  turtle as you are a speeding pickup truck. The roads narrow as you leave the main highways, and finding your way can become an adventure. In this instance, the house itself was not visible from the road.  Only a mailbox and red reflectors gave us a rough idea of where the house was, making the blind, downward, over-the-hump turn onto a steep gravel driveway an act of pure faith.

It was faith well placed.

Life has been crazy lately. Sherri is in the home stretch of a master’s degree, which fills her spare time with constant studying.  I’m preoccupied with a job search. But our stressful lives and the day’s botched plans melted away on the deck as we talked, with no books, no television, no computers to distract us.

Our room was one of two on the lower level of an expansive private residence situated on 45 acres of woods. Across the back part of the property was a large pond, and beyond that hardwoods and pines that reflected back a perfect mirror image of the forest in the still evening air. We had brought with us a small bottle of local wine and spent our evening away from the tempest — both literally and figuratively — rocking on the balcony like two old retirees with nowhere to go.

Sunday morning, Sherri and I drove back to Bloomington, where we drank strong coffee outdoors at a little cafe along Kirkwood Avenue, watching townsfolk returning from church and parents with new grads making their way to brunch.

In a little while, Erin and Colin joined us, each with a Mother’s Day card in hand. The four of us sat in the sun for awhile before wandering down 4th Street with its cornucopia of eclectic restaurants. We settled on a small, family-run Turkish place that none of us had tried before.

Seated at a large wooden table outside, we gorged on excellent Middle Eastern food until we could eat no more. We talked and laughed between bites of bread and sips of hot, sweet tea. For the first time in two days, it seemed, we were enjoying each other’s company.

My Saturday evening with Sherri and my Sunday morning with Erin and Colin was the salvation I needed at the end of what might have been remembered as a hellish weekend. That one sliver of time put all of the weekend’s hassles gently into my past. We had come to Bloomington on family business, and finally, after the storm, we were a family again.

Death of a student

On Nov. 19 of my college sophomore year, Vincent Bugliosi came to the Indiana University campus amid widespread rumors that “something was going to happen.”

Bugliosi was well known as the prosecutor in the Charles Manson trials and author of the book Helter Skelter, “the true story of the Manson Family murders.” Barely six years after Manson went to prison for the grisly killing of actress Sharon Tate, there was still high interest in Bugliosi’s free lecture at the I.U. Auditorium.

Adding to the natural interest was a rumor that something dreadful was afoot and that Bugliosi’s lecture might be the target. Of course, no one had any evidence. Some people were saying that Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, one of the Manson disciples, was orchestrating something. But she was in prison for trying to kill Gerald Ford. Equally far-fetched, psychic Jeanne Dixon had predicted that a mass murder would occur on a Big Ten campus in the coming year.

The various rumors, coupled with Dixon’s prediction, were enough to make us nervous — and determined to show up to the lecture, no matter what. A lot of people apparently thought like my friends and I did, because so many people flocked to the Auditorium for the pre-lecture showing of a film about the murders that ushers had to lock the doors to keep enthusiasts from overflowing the building’s legal capacity.

Now, backtrack to Nov. 17 — two days before Bugliosi came to Bloomington — when my buddies and I decided we were going to go to the lecture. But there was a twist: Keith, another sophomore who lived on the other side of McNutt Quad from me, had news. Actually, his girlfriend had news.

I only met her once, and I don’t remember her name. She and Keith were huddled with several of us in the lounge at the end of my floor.  She had had a “vision.”

A monkey-like creature had appeared to her and she was frightened.  You’ll now think I’m making this up, but it’s not a joke.  According to Keith’s girlfriend, she’d seen this thing twice before, and each time someone close to her had died.  The last time, it was her grandmother.

There was more to the story, but I’ve forgotten it.  I do remember that Keith wrote her story down on a piece of paper, dated it and put it in an envelope. His sealed story would be proof of her prediction — death to someone close to her — if something happened.

My friends and I were among the lucky 3,200 who managed to get into the Auditorium to hear Bugliosi’s lecture. We were all a little nervous that a bomb would go off, or some escaped Manson Family member would show up and begin to gun down Indiana students one by one. But it didn’t happen. Bugliosi was great, the event ended peacefully, and we all went home.

Several days later, though, Keith was dead from an aggressive throat infection that swelled his windpipe shut. I was told that Keith had gone to the doctor, but either they prescribed the wrong thing or it was ineffective.

While time has passed, I still find the experience disturbing. But here’s what bothers me the most:  The person who told me Keith had died — one of my best friends from high school and college, who lived just down the hall from the guy – doesn’t remember any of it.