Bowdoin College Days

We were not always alone. Carol joined my parents and me on a trip to Moosehead Lake in Greenville. Old photographs capture her stunning beauty, youth, innocence, and vitality—she’s gazing over the lake wearing a kerchief over her blond hair; and she’s feeding a wild fawn. And later, in our college days, there were weekends with my parents at Mere Point on Casco Bay—in the photo, she’s sitting aside friends on the back of a Ford Mustang roadster wearing my Bowdoin letter sweater.

God, we had fun.

While at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, I wrote her every day, and raptly awaited her replies. The pen and ink letters are preserved somewhere—I shudder to think our children and grandchildren may someday discover our sophomoric yearnings and idle scribblings.

“Remember those weekends at Bowdoin?” I ask her. The weekends started on Fridays.

“I rode the train from Portland to Brunswick. You’d meet me at the train station. You corrupted me, you know.”

All true. I introduced her to beer, gin and tonics, late night frat parties and songfests.

Friday night, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the Psi U house among other Bowdoin men with their dates, happily buzzed with beer, we listen to Bowdoin’s a cappella songsters serenade us. We make the rounds of the frat houses until the wee hours, and then I escort Carol to her room in a nearby house. I wake her on a bright Saturday morning for breakfast at the Zeta Psi House. We trudge through sun-dappled leaves on the Bowdoin quad to a lecture by illustrious English Professor Herbert Ross Brown on Shakespeare. Wearing a light grey sweater over a white shirt, pleated blue skirt, and white bobby socks, she looks right out of a bandbox. We sit in the front row—a small class, a dozen boys, all eyes on her, the only girl. She sneaks a glance at me and winks, making it hard to concentrate on the lecture. Sunday morning, I wave goodbye to her as the train disappears. The weekends all blur together.

We married before my last year at Bowdoin—I was twenty-two, and Carol was old enough to get her parents’ consent. She’d converted to my Episcopal faith to bring up our kids in the same church. Before our parish priest would marry us, we had to have marriage counseling. By a priest who’d never married. Today, I can’t recall a word of his sage advice. Carol recalls one thing—it’s only her short-term memory that’s impaired.

“He told us never go to bed mad at each other.”

We’ve tried to do that. But we’ve had bigger issues. It’s the part of the marriage service that you never think about—no one does; the part where the priest asks you both, “In sickness and in health?” And you each say, “I do.” Because you’re in the pink of health and in your youthful exuberance, you think, “That’s never going to happen to us, or we’ll be so old, that’s a lifetime away.” But we were still surprised when it happened to us late in life.