THE 5TH STAGE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…


Schools in general, and colleges in particular, used to start classes after harvest season. So it was in this week on the calendar of 1955 that I matriculated at Indiana University.

During Orientation Week of that freshman year, men’s and women’s dorms were paired up for mixers. The point of the mixer was to hook up with a girl, hook up in those days being a benign term that simply meant finding a date, and then going to the campus-wide dance in Alumni Hall in the Union Building, the largest student union building in the world, we are always proud to say. Normally Linden Hall would have been paired with Pine Hall, since the Pine Hall girls, known as Pine Swine for no reason other than the rhyme, were on The Residence Scholarship Plan [for poor but motivated students], as were the boys of Linden Hall-East, boys and girls being what we called boys and girls in those days, instead of men and women, as college boys and girls are called now. For some reason, though, probably because the Pine Hall girls rejected the idea, Linden Hall was paired with Oak Hall instead.

All the Ahaywehs, as the denizens of Linden East were later called, referring to Dante’s abandon hope, all ye who enter here, dutifully trooped over to Oak and began to mix. Somehow I ended up with a slender brunette.

I don’t remember much about that night. We walked to the Union, and I suppose I tried to dance, although it is more likely that I made many trips to the punch bowl to avoid dancing, and then we walked back to Oak Hall. I must have made a better impression than I thought, because as soon as we got inside the door to Oak Hall, she grabbed me in a passionate embrace and began to kiss me like my face was sweet corn and she had missed supper.

I have no idea why she did that. We had known each other for about three hours. I was skinny and awkward and about as average-looking as they came. Maybe it was because she didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her friends, since all of them were doing the same thing, and she didn’t want to admit she had hooked one that should have been thrown back. Maybe she was just curious to see how a farm boy would react and knew she had nothing to lose, since the Head Resident would soon blow her whistle to indicate visiting hours were over and all of the frustrated lotharios had to go home. I never saw her again after that night, except at a distance in the Arbutus Dining Hall, where all the people who lived in Trees ate. [1]

The fifth of the eight stages of psycho-social adjustment, as outlined by Erik Erikson, is Intimacy vs. Isolation, coinciding with the late teens and early twenties. The eighth stage, in the final years of life, is Integrity vs. Despair, which asks the question: Did my life through the other stages have meaning? Did I negotiate those stages successfully and grow into a mature person?

The way we successfully negotiate Integrity vs. Despair is by going back through the earlier stages, reviewing them so that we can accept them as necessary parts of who we are. I hope as that Oak Hall girl reviews her fifth stage, she doesn’t feel she never made it through Intimacy vs. Isolation because of that awkward boy in that mixer in her freshman year, for I still remember her name, after fifty-six years.

JRMcF

1] Trees Center had 8 wooden two-story dorms that had been built as temporary housing for military personnel during WWII. All were named for trees. I recall Laurel and Hickory as well as those named above. We were “men in trees” long before the TV show of that name.

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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