The Meaning of These Days. Kenneth Daniel Stephens

my philosophy studies were going as well as they were.

      Clueless as to what to do, but knowing that I had to do something, I had taken a chance. I went to her in the library and asked her if I could talk to her. We went outside and sat on the grass, and I did something I will never, never do again. I actually told her my feelings prematurely. She said that she had a serious relationship with her boyfriend going to college elsewhere. Nervous beyond your imagination, I ended the conversation there and then. I was relieved that I had gotten the matter off my chest. Finished and done with.

      Actually it worsened the situation. The romantic tension between us seemed no longer something suppressed, but an outward and obvious fact.

      Now as I watched this woman who resembled Ruth, the other women standing across from me, and the couples lost in each other on the dance floor, and as I heard the strains of Willow Weep for Me, it was easy to forget my love troubles. For these few hours I too was lost in the preternatural frenzy of ants finding sugar, especially on a holiday with its special party commotion and decorations and skimpy costumes the women wore, and I found solace in the precious few minutes of face to face, I and Thou conversation I could afford with the other. On New Year’s Eve I was not alone. On Christmas evening I had somewhere to go. On Independence Day I had something to look forward to.

      You know she wants you somewhere deep down. She wants to come to know you better, but you do not give her the chance. You are shy, and you await the fullness of time. Here in this club you pay your money and there is little risk. You pay your money and you can dance cheek to cheek even with the pretty one, if she agrees to dance with you for a paltry ten minutes, strictly kept. You pay your money and now you stand out from the other men. Now the world can watch you float, glide on the floor and see what you really know, how cool, suave you really are, what poise you have. You are vulnerable, yes, but no one sees that now. The evening has been framed by Stormy Weather or the wail of a saxophone. Behind your streetcar of desire is the steam engine known as love, invisible in the night. No one knows, except a Sinatra song, the magnitude, the futile melancholy of your isolation. In the wee small hours of the morning, that’s when you miss her most of all.

      9 | Mount Baldy

      The courage to be in the face of nonbeing

      I was forever in dire need of some kind of help to make the next move, the next advance of my life. If it was not for the special letter of recommendation from my philosophy professor Dr. Williams, I would not have been accepted at the Claremont School of Theology. I look back fondly and gratefully on him just as I look back in the same way on the Reverend Woodruff, the Yosemite chaplain. Both built bridges of transcendence to yonder shore for a person they knew had a spotty record and a tenuous existence in this country. They saw the fog of uncertainty enshrouding the young man’s life, but they also witnessed the fire of life in his zesty public campground ministry in the one case and the assiduousness of his class work in the other. They had faith, they must have had, that the young man would in turn someday build bridges for others.

      Claremont is a town on the Eastern edge of Los Angeles County. It is the home of a consortium of colleges and graduate school, all private, and of the seminary to which I was admitted. This seminary did not feel cloistered to me. It had just recently opened its doors in that location, and consequently the student body was small and the buildings new and sparse. The architecture and landscaping bespoke cactus and open desert. Mount Baldy loomed to the north as Mount Tamalpais had done in San Anselmo to the west, but the former was dry, rocky, and gulchy.