Car becomes time machine

Sometimes the family car can turn into a time machine.
Consider a drive to Richmond Saturday morning.
We were headed to Earlham College to connect with some old friends at my wife’s 45th college reunion.
The two of us had met and fallen in love at Earlham and have been together ever since. My 45th reunion was last year, and I didn’t attend for some reason. But Connie had been a great sport about my 50th high school reunion in June, so I figured I owed it to her to attend Saturday’s festivities.
The time machine kicked in before we hit the city limits.
Funny, I said, I remember hitch-hiking back to Jay County from Earlham numerous times my freshman year. But I don’t have very clear memories of hitch-hiking back. How come I remember one part of the trip but not the return?
And then the other questions started to pop up.
And the memories started to flow.
Both of us remembered that freshman smackdown when we received papers back with grades lower than anything we’d received in high school.
For both of us, it was a course called Humanities. It was required, and it was our first introduction to serious reading, serious writing and serious classroom discussion.
Neither of us was up for the challenge when we arrived on campus back in the day.
High school had been less than challenging academically. Oh, sure, there were some tough classes and some tough teachers and some subjects that required more work than others.
But it wasn’t in the same league with what we ran into in college. In other words, neither of us were really prepared for what hit us.
My first paper in Humanities came back with either a C-minus or a D. When I had turned it in — typed on onion skin paper on a portable Smith-Corona I had received for Christmas and accompanied by five carbon copies for other members of my discussion group — I figured it was an A-minus or B-plus effort.
(Younger readers can now feel free to Google Smith-Corona and “carbon copies” so they’ll know what I’m talking about.)
But a B-plus effort at Portland High School was lucky to warrant a C-minus in college.
The time machine kept churning.
The shock effect of that grade on my first Humanities paper sent me instantly back to my first term at Earlham. The calendar still read 2016 and I was driving south on U.S. 27 in Randolph County, but mentally it was the fall of 1966 and I was a clueless freshman wandering around campus.
Why did I take calculus? I couldn’t figure that out.
Contact with my faculty adviser was minimal, more of a cookies and a Coke reception than any real guidance.
I was already pretty sure I was going to major in English literature. So why in the world take calculus?
Math offerings at PHS in that era ended with trigonometry, and while Bob Freemyer had done his best to lead me through that jungle, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I was tackling calculus during fall term as a freshman.
To make matters worse, the class convened at 8:30 a.m. Not an optimum time for freshman students.
Fortunately, a guy across the hall in my dorm had his act together far more than I did. He was a pre-med student, and his focus on calculus was laser-like. Thanks to his guidance and example, I hit the homework religiously, usually working with Pete as we puzzled our way through the toughest problems.
We both got B’s in the course, as I recall. My knowledge of calculus swiftly poured out of my brain as if there had been a leak in my skull. Pete went on to build a career in medicine.
And still more memories kept tumbling out.
Whatever happened to this classmate? What did we do for homecoming? Weren’t the social rules — strict curfews for female students, shouts of “Man on the hall” when someone’s father visited a girls’ dormitory — remarkably quaint?
The time machine, it turns out, didn’t stop when the car was parked.
It revved up again when Connie and her classmates gathered around a table for lunch, and the stories kept on coming.
Then again, isn’t that what class reunions are for?