Letters from home freshman year

                                                                                                                                           January 6, 2024 

[Listen here to the Lines n' Lyrix version of My Old Man, Steve Goodman's dedication to his dad]

Our basement flooded recently. As I aired it out, I discovered a filled folder of old letters and cards that I’d saved. Among the water-damaged pages were letters from my college days, circa 1970. Still mostly legible 50+ years later, but needing to be scanned if I want to keep them. I do. 

I say “college days” instead of “college years” because I noticed that almost all the letters were from the first half of freshman year. Regular letters from my parents. They lasted the year. My dad did most of the writing. My mom considered herself a “greenhorn” and wasn’t confident writing in English. Crammed into the rest of the folder were a few hundred letters, no exaggeration, from high school chums, many of whom I don’t recall maintaining a friendship with once I went to Grinnell, 300 miles due west of my Chicago home. No wonder I have such a fond and clear memory of Ernie, the campus post office guy. A few of my friends’ communiques made it through break. They vanished before summer. The letters from friends were of all shapes, sizes, colors and designs, period pieces worthy of a retro exhibit. I learned from a quick once over that I was apparently known by a flurry of pet names in high school, like Black Jack, Mad Dog, Dip-Breath, Cracker, Jacob, Podner, Jackie Poo, Zalman King, Dop, and Dobbs.

It will take me awhile to do memory justice to them, so I decided to read my parents’ for now. My dad’s letters were in the same handwriting, mostly on 6”X 8” paper. I got used to deciphering them. The first letter from my parents was dated Labor Day.

It referenced a package I would be getting with 25 bank checks imprinted with my name. I was now a man. We’d invested in a long-distance call (me reversing the charges of 85 cents) before then in which I told them my hay fever was acting up. Iowa alfalfa? Marijuana? The next letter expressed disappointment that I wasn’t coming home for the Jewish high holidays. My parents planned to accept Grinnell’s offer, as one letter put it, to visit on Parents’ Day Oct. 31. I got a parcel with candies from my mom and a reform high holiday prayer book from my dad, with wishes for continued strength in body and spirit. My dad’s notes became peppered with Hebrew words, as he wrote how proud he was to be asked to do an Aliyah Levi at the Torah during high holiday services. I had wished my dad happy birthday and he told me a friend had gotten my mom and him two tickets to “Butterflies Are Free.” My folks didn’t go the theater much. 

One letter provided addresses of our relatives in Israel so I could write them too. Apparently my high school chums who were in college nearer to home would drop in and visit my folks. 

By Oct. 20, our letters expressed mutual feelings of loneliness. I’d apparently written them that food at Grinnell was “not very palatable,” to which my dad responded with a Hebrew phrase that he translated for me: “Such is the way of the student of learning.” They wrote how much they anticipated my return home for Thanksgiving. Seems I didn’t make it home. My dad repeatedly asked in the letters for me to reflect more on my course subjects. In the Thanksgiving letter, he wrote how pleased he was that I was in the company of such learned writers as Thucydides, “the student of cause and effect in history.” My dad was clearly reveling in vicarious education. He was also noting that he liked my writing style; that my heart was in it and that therefore my heart was in writing to them. That made it easier, he wrote, to not be with me for Thanksgiving. He would look forward to my homecoming “in the near future.” I apparently phoned on Thanksgiving. The next letter – on Dec. 5 – mentioned that I was a student of logic. At some point, probably at the time I received the letter, I highlighted in yellow the next phrase: “It therefore follows logically that upon receipt of this letter, you will call us again and tell us, especially, how you are progressing with your finals.” 

They stuck with me after break and wrote in late January that they’d received my grade report. They were “extremely happy therewith,” as my dad put it. They hoped I’d make it home for my birthday in late Feb. I didn’t. The next letter enclosed a birthday check for $18, which spells out Chai (or life) in Hebrew. Next in line for a visit home was Passover, in early April. My favorite holiday. Didn’t make that one either. Seems as I read over the 1st year correspondences with my parents that college was all consuming for me, and that’s how I wanted it. It reminds me that when my parents drove me to campus to begin college, I couldn’t wait for them to drive off so I could set off on this college/Grinnell thing. My folks and I kept up our correspondence through the school year. Last exchange: May 11, ’71, two days after Mother’s Day. My dad thanked me for having one of my high school buddies deliver flowers to my mom. He called Shel (my oldest friend to this day) my “harbinger of surprises.” 

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