Over the last year, my 18YO son and I have spent much of our time together talking about, applying to, and touring colleges.
As I write this sentence, we’re exactly six months away from move-in weekend at the university he’s most interested in. (OMG)
When he and I talk about university life, our conversations eventually lead to how, for so many, we learn as much outside the classroom as we ever do inside.
That was certainly true for me:
First off, I learned about enduring friendship. Thank heavens.
That, and a couple other things.
Here they are—
I entered college with an inclination.
It started in that transitional time between being a kid, and being a teenager.
In some vague memory, my second-favorite-thing-at-the-time—second only to whatever was my favorite-thing-at-the-time, whether comic books and graphic novels, or sports teams, or R/C cars and video games—in some vague memory, my second-favorite-thing-at-the-time, after my favorite-thing-at-the-time, was this:
Talking about my favorite-thing.
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As a freshman at Indiana University, my favorite class was ENG-142: Introduction to Writing and Study of Literature.
I’ll never forget our professor, Ray Hedin.
Professor Ray Hedin, and his contagious enthusiasm, as he zealously waved his arms while walking and talking about Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Professor Ray Hedin’s arms passionately waving in Indiana University’s giant Ballantine lecture hall as he paced the dais; the way that hall looked—like the very embodiment of mid-century American academia—and felt—like I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be there—and sounded—the spoken echoes interrupted by shuffling paper and scribing inkpens—and its very scent—tile and wood and history and, from the smoking lounge in the basement, Camel Lights.
So many of us in a freshman lecture class, in Ballantine Hall, moving in and out of groups, in and out of discussions, in and out of ideas, spending our time.
Spending our days, a hundred and more of us, in Ballantine Hall, its steep stairways and cool, curved wooden seats, but then by night, just a handful of close classmates meeting at the Waffle House, sliding into laminate booths on 10th Street, between Walnut and College.
Waffle House on 10th, 10PM, to discuss Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Professor Ray Hedin and Ballantine Hall. We’d drink coffee, energetically wave our arms in the air, slowly poke pancakes with a fork, maybe a cigarette, and not notice the clock as it passed midnight, 1, 2, even 3AM.
The right people in the right room; it’s never the same way twice.
Close classmates become closer friends, a closer connection.
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No one in my family had ever pursued higher-education, and my parents and I didn’t know anything about it. We just figured that if you got good enough grades, you went, and whatever class you got the best grades in, should probably be your major.
And all I knew about a major was that it leads to what you end up doing for the rest of your life.
One day, Bob Trammel, Northrop High School’s calculus teacher, required our class to take a university’s advanced-placement calculus exam. Mr. Trammel didn’t just want the correct answer; he wanted to see the work behind how you got the answer. He’d say, “I’m from Missouri: show me.”
I earned the second highest score in the senior class.
And for that reason, and that reason alone, I started college as a Mathematics major.
All I knew about a major was that it leads to what you end up doing for the rest of your life.
As a Mathematics major, I was going to be an actuary, even though I didn’t know what an actuary did, because my parents read somewhere that that’s a good job.
Just before the holiday break of my freshman year, though, I had a transformational experience, and I ended up spending the entirety of the second semester questioning what the rest of my life was going to be like. What it was going to mean. Whether it was going to matter.
By the start of the next academic year, I had turned away from Mathematics. And I had declared myself a Fine Arts major.
Still, all I knew about a major was that it leads to what you end up doing for the rest of your life.
As a Fine Arts major, I was going to be a graphic designer, even though I didn’t know what a graphic designer did, because I thought I could convince my parents that that’s a good job.
Mathematics and Fine Arts had overlapping requisites—including a dollop of English Lit—which led me to ENG-142 with professor Ray Hedin.
What had been revealed to me at the Waffle House was that talking about writing for those requisite classes—the books, novels, short stories, fiction, non-fiction, essays, plays, long-form journalism and more—talking about writing was such an enriching highlight of my life at that time, and in fact represented the bulk of my social life at that time, that long after the required dollop, I just kept taking English Lit classes.
I kept taking English Lit classes, so I could keep having books to read.
I kept having books to read, so I could keep having books to talk about.
Over coffee.
Late at night.
Our arms waving in the air.
Maybe a cigarette.
And the discovery, of course, was that when we got to create our own writing—either analysis of a work we were studying, or better yet our own prose—when we got to create our own writing, we found that our greatest influence was not the work we were studying, but rather us talking about the work we were studying.
A couple years later, now a senior, I met with my academic advisor to plan out my final semester and to put the final touches on my Fine Arts degree.
When we were wrapping up, she said, “And don’t forget, you need to take one more English Lit class to complete that major, too.”
Huh?
Wait.
What?
I had no idea.
I blinked, and I had a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature.
All I knew about a major was that it leads to what you end up doing for the rest of your life.
Yet no matter what it said on the diploma, I also knew that what I actually majored in was not English Literature.
In fact and in practice, what I actually majored in was talking about English Literature.
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That fact and that practice persists to this day.
Recently, I once again found myself in the right room with the right people.
We were talking about Kurt Wagner, the singer, songwriter and leader of Lambchop—once called “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band.”
In a recent podcast interview, Kurt was pressed about how he keeps his artistic life full with purpose, three decades and sixteen albums in.
Wagner mused, “You have to ask yourself, what do you want out of this thing you call creativity? What is it you want to get back? And when are you satisfied?”
As we explored those questions late one night, I came to understand that I feel the same way about creativity, and creative endeavors, as I did about Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
At heart, I’m seeking community. I’m seeking a closer connection. I’m seeking depth of conversation and thoughtfulness and exploration. And together, some sense of discovery.
Because discovery is what makes everything else I do, better.
That’s what led me halfway around the planet last summer, to learn from Joe Henry and Krista Tippett and Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi and Padraig O’Tuama, at a literary salon entitled Journey to the Common Good.
Yes: I love reading and listening to their work, in deep focus.
But what I coveted, and what made all the difference, was the chance to talk to them about the work.
And then, and of course, to find that talking to them about the work isn’t really talking to them about work at all, but is instead talking to them about everything that informed and deepened the work, and how that—that discovery—is what truly leads to what you end up doing for the rest of your life.
Kurt, to answer your question: this is what I want out of creativity.
My senior year, one of my roommates got a new Microsoft computer, which came with a digital encyclopedia called Bookshelf ‘95.
I put the CD-ROM in the tray, opened the Bookshelf program and clicked on the ‘Quotations’ tab.
I typed “Bob Dylan” into the search bar.
(I had just started listening to Bob, after buying the Greatest Hits Volume 3 CD at my favorite record store on Kirkwood Avenue.)
Many of Bob’s lyrics were displayed through the query.
Amongst them, this one:
“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
~
(1965, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’)
I stared at the screen.
The cursor blinked. But this time, I did not.
After I read that lyric, and I can say this without an iota of hyperbole, I knew that my life would never be the same.
“Discovery” not easy. Not easy to find, and sometimes not easy to endure.
I often have to re-center, and remind myself that discovery is the thing; remind myself to not take a shortcut and presume that I already know the answer, or that I already know myself well enough to even recognize the answer.
But, instead, to surrender to it.
Through creative pursuits, we each discover solutions, answers, new ideas, yes. But most importantly, we discover ourselves.
This wasn’t natural to me.
My upbringing was lower-case-c-conservative. You picked a path, settled in, stayed quiet, and did your work.
But I found myself restless, agitated, uneasy, especially as I neared graduation.
I was feeling a little flammable. And that Dylan lyric entered my life like a blowtorch.
And then—
Second-semester, senior year, I finally took an oil painting class.
(I had identified graphic design as my focus area—because I had convinced my parents that that’s a good job—but the visual art I loved was painting.)
We had a smart, generous and slightly mystical grad student as our instructor.
He would participate alongside us as we painted our still lifes—bowls of fruit and the like—but we never really saw any of the work he created on his own.
One day in class, though, he taped a flyer to the wall, and shared that the following weekend, he was going to give a talk at an art co-op on the outskirts of campus.
At this talk, he would present a series of his paintings.
I left my comfort zone—still, always and forever worried I wasn’t cool enough, or artsy enough, or qualified enough to be there—and attended the talk, alone.
I expected to find a small gallery filled with canvas and easels, walls adorned with his work.
Instead, I was directed to an unfinished basement, haphazardly arranged, a slide projector, and a bed-sheet screen; the scent of turpentine resting heavy in the air as a cool breeze moved about the room.
There were maybe 15 people in the basement. Slowly, they sat down—first on the few chairs in the space, then on crates and boxes, and finally, directly on the dirty concrete floor.
The right people in the right room; it’s never the same way twice.
My instructor, who had blended in with the other students, remained standing, and started to address the small group—saying he was going to walk us through a series of self-portraits he had painted over the years.
He turned on the projector and began, slowly, one dozen paintings, one at a time in his slide tray.
Chk-chnk, went the slide tray, each time he advanced. Chk-chnk.
With each painting, he talked in a loose and freewheeling way about the place he was when he created it. Geographically, yes, but also—where he was in his life.
Then, a dozen more, one by one, and another dozen, one after another.
With each painting, stories expanded, but so did the styles and techniques he explored in the work, the color palettes and brush strokes he applied.
The paintings were each different from the last, with just one single consistent element—each was the same width and height.
As he discussed a painting, now and again he would laugh.
Sometimes choke up.
He would admonish himself, or celebrate a moment.
He was self-deprecating, yet proud. Vulnerable, and confident.
Some of the portraits created joy in his voice, others caused a clear pain.
When the last slide transitioned to an empty slot in the tray, and a bright light revealed the off-white bed-sheet screen’s imperfections, he turned off the projector.
He wondered if we would like to see one more painting.
Yes.
Then he asked for a moment, and wandered behind the screen, before emerging from a darkened corner of the basement with a framed painting.
He placed it on a heavy, well-used easel.
It was his most-recent self portrait.
We stood, and gathered around the painting, closely inspecting it.
As we drew close, slowly and quietly, he first disassembled, and then removed the painting’s substantial frame.
He turned the canvas on its side, placed it on a work table, and asked us to come closer.
With his nicked and paint-covered hands, he pointed out the thickness of the oil paint on top of the original canvas. Using his thumb to mark the width, he showed it to be a half-inch or more, paint on top of paint on top of paint on top of paint.
And he said, “These are my self-portraits.”
Silence around the table, silence in the room.
“Every painting in my slide show is right here.”
After a moment, a girl to my left spoke.
“Are you…saying…?”
She stopped herself.
“Yes,” he replied.
“And I’m about to prime and paint over this one, too, and…”
He didn’t have to complete his thought.
Not for me, anyway.
I already understood.
Because like him,
I too was reflecting on who I had been,
living with who I was,
and discovering who I was yet to become.
When my son and I talk about colleges, we cover an awful lot of topics.
We talk about academics, class size, financial aid, residence options, career placement, clubs and activities, scholarship opportunities, and more.
When we tour a campus, we look for all that stuff, too.
On the tour, most universities like to show off their facilities, their lecture halls and their classrooms.
We like seeing those things.
But we like exploring outside the classroom just as much.
We wander, and we look for the right people, in the right rooms.
We search for some sense of what you may end up doing for the rest of your life.
Because what we’re really seeking is a Waffle House.
A bookshelf of quotations.
An art co-op, with an unfinished basement studio.
And, most importantly: ourselves.
This essay is named after the song “Who Are You” by Tom Waits,
from his album ‘Bone Machine.’ (It’s worth the time to listen.)
“You better get down on the floor;
don’t you know this is war?
Tell me, who are you this time?
Tell me:
Who are you this time?”
I swear to god, if “ The right people in the right room; it’s never the same way twice” doesn’t make it into a song.
As always, a fine read. Best is that beyond the words there is always that little something that accurately defines my own journey, or leads to a new discovery. Discovery is my fuel. A life without that pumping in my veins is certainly a life wasted. And that discovery is indeed in the lecture hall, the late-night Waffle House, and most definitely in this beer hall in Prague.
Your son is in good hands Matt...