Portland Magazine Autumn 2012

SOME THINGS That I have noticed here at the university over the past twenty years, things that give me the joyful willies, tiny things that are not tiny at all in the least whatsoever: the way the women’s soccer team took their shoes and socks off after yet another victory, and sat in cheerful ragged circle on the sweet moist field, and then wandered up into the stands to sit with children and shake their startled hands and sign tickets and jackets and shirts and hands and one tiny forehead, whose owner beamed like the sun. The way some tall shy lean children here walk around in their Army and Air Force uniforms on Tuesdays, uncomfortable and proud and scared and proud. The way sandhill cranes float over campus in October, so high up you can hardly see them, although you can hear their dark basso gurgling quarwk, and the way people who hear them will touch passersby on the elbows and say hey, listen, cranes! The way students say hey, Father when a priest ambles by, and the priest, no matter which priest he happens to be, almost always knows the long child by his or her first name, isn’t that amazing? The way the wind shifts around during the day and what was the seethe of cedar in the morning becomes the whew of industrial paint from the vast roiling shipyards below the bluff. The way you can almost always find one person young or old weeping quietly in the dark in the back of the chapel, near the Madonna. The way water burbles in the chapel all day all night ever since the day the chapel opened its new huge walnut doors as big as bears.

The way alumni at reunion seize each other by the hand with actual no kidding ferocious glee and shake hands much longer than the usual business deal. The way the bell tower startles visitors who did not know the tower spoke so boomingly and ringingly. The whir of golf carts carrying older priests hither and yon. The wealth of orders of nuns who grace the place. The way ballboys at basketball games sprint out bravely into the thicket of lank and burl to mop the floor where a muscled hero fell a moment before. The way the baseball coach grins at comic remarks offered by the folks in the rain in the wooden bleachers, and how there is always a cigar going somewhere in the stands even though there is Absolutely No Smoking whatsoever. The way a solid shot to right field occasionally hits Corrado Hall smack in the eastern shoulder with a resounding crack! and the way the hall sneers and rolls the ball back toward the field. The sound that foul balls make when they land with a crunk! on the hoods of cars parked near the baseball field.

The milling of grinning graduates in leis and serapes and bright scarves just after graduation and the way the dense crowd of graduates and families and friends calves here and there into hilarious photo opportunities. The whirl of hawks and eagles in mating dances high over campus in spring. The way you can see the flicker of the huge fireplace in the Commons from way across the quad at night and it looks wonderfully warm and friendly and gentle and alluring and when you walk through the door and turn toward the fireplace someone says hey come sit with us! and you do, and somehow that’s not a little thing, that’s a huge thing, and somehow that matters deeply, and somehow that is the University, in ways that I cannot explain very well, hard as I try. n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of a novella, Cat’s Foot.