dp hour
Yesterday, I did one of my favorite things. I walked through the impossibly crisp blue Waco day over to the SUB, the Student Union Building, and had my fill of Baylor's Tuesday afternoon social hour. It's held in the drawing room every week from three to four. Toward the head of the room, there's a table with a few giant bowls full of milkshake, which you ladle into a plastic cocktail cup. Then you sit around and socialize with whoever's there, or read, or, as I did yesterday, people-watch.
I've mentioned before how much I like this place and its vaulted ceiling and hardwood floor and ornate rugs and gilt-framed mirrors and paintings. The whole feel of it is comfily different from other, newer parts of the campus, which veer from the office-bland to the mall-spiffy to the faux-hip, but never reach this effortless grace. The students seem to like it, too. Maybe they feel, as I always did, complimented, the way you feel with the great-uncle who always talked to you like a grown-up.
I toured the room several times, and saw a collection of people Tom Wolfe would never recognize. No white cords dangling from the ears, no circles of kids all talking on cell phones, no sign of brute proto-careerism. Just friendly folk chatting and studying. Gathered around the piano were six guys of rugby shirt and shaggy hair, plunking through a hymnlike fraternity Sweetheart Song ("her praise we sing / our song shall ring") for a solid, maddening forty-five minutes. Standing around the drawing room floor and sitting on tapestry couches around old ornate tables were clusters of three or five or eight people of such wholesomeness, and such perfectly varied ethnicity, that any group of them could have stepped straight off the cover of the college brochure.
Much has changed, though little has changed. That there wasn't a single dress or skirt in sight would have been unthinkable twenty years ago when I was a freshman at Baylor and wore crisp khakis and fraternized with bow-haired gals in Laura Ashley print dresses with lace yokes. Of course, jeans and sweats were completely unremarkable by the eighties, but it would have been unusual to see a room devoid of dresses. Even so, if Marie Mathis, the founder of what was at first called Coffee Hour, could be beamed from nineteen fifty-two to now, she'd immediately recognize everything about it.
The word "collegial" kept springing to my mind, gathering richness. What could be more central to a college than this collegiality, this gathering of like- and unlike-minded folk, sharing a moment of calm, a meandering conversation, a laugh? An hour a week that's unprogrammed, unstructured, and unplugged, but nonetheless a formal event, is a civilized blessing. No one uttered a toast, but every drink was a drink to the university's good health.
I've mentioned before how much I like this place and its vaulted ceiling and hardwood floor and ornate rugs and gilt-framed mirrors and paintings. The whole feel of it is comfily different from other, newer parts of the campus, which veer from the office-bland to the mall-spiffy to the faux-hip, but never reach this effortless grace. The students seem to like it, too. Maybe they feel, as I always did, complimented, the way you feel with the great-uncle who always talked to you like a grown-up.
I toured the room several times, and saw a collection of people Tom Wolfe would never recognize. No white cords dangling from the ears, no circles of kids all talking on cell phones, no sign of brute proto-careerism. Just friendly folk chatting and studying. Gathered around the piano were six guys of rugby shirt and shaggy hair, plunking through a hymnlike fraternity Sweetheart Song ("her praise we sing / our song shall ring") for a solid, maddening forty-five minutes. Standing around the drawing room floor and sitting on tapestry couches around old ornate tables were clusters of three or five or eight people of such wholesomeness, and such perfectly varied ethnicity, that any group of them could have stepped straight off the cover of the college brochure.
Much has changed, though little has changed. That there wasn't a single dress or skirt in sight would have been unthinkable twenty years ago when I was a freshman at Baylor and wore crisp khakis and fraternized with bow-haired gals in Laura Ashley print dresses with lace yokes. Of course, jeans and sweats were completely unremarkable by the eighties, but it would have been unusual to see a room devoid of dresses. Even so, if Marie Mathis, the founder of what was at first called Coffee Hour, could be beamed from nineteen fifty-two to now, she'd immediately recognize everything about it.
The word "collegial" kept springing to my mind, gathering richness. What could be more central to a college than this collegiality, this gathering of like- and unlike-minded folk, sharing a moment of calm, a meandering conversation, a laugh? An hour a week that's unprogrammed, unstructured, and unplugged, but nonetheless a formal event, is a civilized blessing. No one uttered a toast, but every drink was a drink to the university's good health.
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