Pomona College, 50 Years On: Recollections from the Class of 1970

By Joseph Fraizer

A collection of stories, recollections, and poetry by members of the Pomona College Class of 1970, inspired by their 50th class reunion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Fraizer
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463289648

Book preview

Not incidental among the benefits of the liberal arts education are the acquisitions of both an extensive vocabulary and the experience to occasion its use.

Roget's Perplex

by Christopher Askew

I know of no piece of the whole human muddle

more likely to keep our best judgment at bay —

more likely to addle, unsettle, befuddle,

discomfort, disquiet, disturb and dismay;

to bother, bewilder, bewitch, and bamboozle,

to agitate, captivate, exercise, ail,

bedim and bedazzle and frazzle and foozle,

discomfit, distemper, divert and derail;

to cozen and chivy, occlude and confusticate,

mix up and mess up, becloud and bemuse,

to take in, to fake out, disrupt, discombobulate,

diddle, disorient, daze and confuse;

to humbug and buffalo, hoodwink and hornswoggle,

jumble and jangle, beguile and boondoggle,

mortify, mystify, maze, faze and fuss;

confound and discountenance, pother, nonplus,

to freak out, to weird out, to wile and to worry,

to disconcert, discompose, fluster and flurry,

to boggle, to baffle, delude and distress,

to torture, to torment, hagride and harass;

to upset, unhinge us, derange and distract us,

to rattle, alarm us, disarm and impact us,

to feint, fleece and flummox, perturb and perplex,

to devil, unravel and pester and vex —

than sex.

Not all education, of course, is academic, and not all growth is of the mind, Deo gratias. Our shared moments in a Santa-Ana-freshened Maxfield Parrish setting with those of like mind and heart shaped so much more than our intellects, built so much more than our careers.

Moments

by Christopher Askew

Never mind that we crossed paths

among the avocado trees

Forget the bright wind tossing

auburn strands across your sagebrush eyes

Forget your sun-warmed hands

that held my arm as if I were a prize

to cherish, not a passing rambler

tumbling down the desert breeze.

Never mind we sat, your arm in mine,

beneath the orange-blossom skies

Forget we lingered as the sunset lined

your upturned face with gold

Forget how lilac shadows swept the hills

bade jasmine flowers unfold

to bathe us in their sweetness

as our small talk settled into sighs.

Never mind that we lay side by side

as seaside night turned bright and cold

Forget we fell into the well of stars

and, on the still-warm sand

soared through uncharted nebulae

in silence, 'til you found my hand

and pressed it to your heart

and pledged together we'd grow old.

Never mind our past

our precious moments shape us as we stand

but know however long the journey

you remain my promised land.

The core of the traditional liberal arts education is a continuous breath-snatching immersion in the swells and troughs of human experience (symbolically encapsulated in that 45-minute water-treading exercise required to graduate), mostly through the mechanism of reading. So much reading, in fact, that one may find the orbit of one's later life perturbed by what one hasn't read.

War & Peace

by Christopher Askew

I've never read War and Peace.

In my youth it was just too long a journey for a dyslectic

to embark on. Even after I made friends with words

and spent all spare hours in books, my reluctance lingered.

I had seen Dr. Zhivago. I sat through The Cherry Orchard.

Mostly awake. With those and nesting dolls and borscht,

I figured I knew everything I needed to know about Russia.

In time I confessed this to my Significant Other.

Imagine my lack of surprise when on my next birthday

she gave me a beautiful leather-bound copy - gold embossed,

supple calfskin, thin paper like they use in Bibles. Still

thick as a cinder block.

Inscribed on the flyleaf in a flowing hand, "To my darling

daughter: on your sixteenth birthday, more about the human

condition than I hope you will ever need to know. Love, Dad."

(Not me. I'm nobody's daughter and way past sixteen.

The S.O. is cultured but cheap.)

I made a real effort to read it. On planes, in waiting rooms.

Always with me. Vacations, business trips. (But not the beach

or the bath - S.O. forbid! I left it on the coffee table to

impress friends until it was used as a coaster once too often.)

With all that opportunity, I got up to maybe page twelve.

I didn't want to not read it, but the concatenation of negatives

confounded even my shrink, who told me unequivocally that

had I spent half the time reading that I spent worrying about

not reading, I would have nothing to worry about.

Eventually the S.O. took this failure as a referendum on our

relationship and left with a ski instructor, a handsome hunk

without a reflective bone in his chiseled body.

So here I am, slumped in my chair, awash in defeat, my feet up

on an impressive gold-embossed supple-calfskin Bible-paper

footstool containing wisdom about the human condition

I'd hoped I'd never need to know.

The Gift of the Spider Woman

by Christopher Askew

It was Jonathan's fault.

Spring of junior year, someone's graduating-senior music-major friend Jonathan – someone said at dinner – wanted to leave a mark.

Someone thought Jonathan wanted to make a farewell gesture, to depart bearing his added riches in trvst in one hand and with the other waving a back-handed appreciation of all that was worthy and wonderful about Pomona and the Music Department of Fruits and Nuts. Someone elicited aid.

This was in Oldenborg, the newly minted a-mighty-fortress-is-our-god center for international (and inter-gender-al) studies. The food was good, the table round, and the company redefining by example the depth and scope of the term nerd with every utterance. From between bouts of banter and straw-wrapper air-hockey emerged a venue – Little Bridges, unanimously agreed on as the only appropriately mythopoeic site – and a raw grand geste – spanning the balcony gap. Someone was pleased.

Remember that thing you do with a ruler, graph paper and too much time on your hands, making a parabolic curve out of straight lines drawn between successive points on the X and Y axes? Successive points not unlike the balusters in Little Bridges' balcony rails? You could draw the lines using rope. Dramatic, but heavy. Expensive. You'd need a lot. Or clothesline. String. Less expensive, but still. Thread. Black thread would be cheap, easy to handle, and mysterious.

Someone went and got measurements. Someone else got the graph paper, marked the points, drew the lines. Everyone looked at the result and went, Hmmm.

Look at that picture of the straight-line parabolic curve you just Googled. Simple. Elegant. Restrained. Compact. Even doubled, it would leave so much of the actual space across the hall un-spanned. For all its iconic beauty, it was not the exuberant gesture we had been imagining.

Someone wondered why didn't we just connect every post to every other post? Someone was eyed sternly. Someone shrugged. Someone else did the math, About seven miles of thread. Everyone grimaced. About 30 jumbo spools. Everyone breathed. Someone else said, Let's do it. So we did.

Next day someone arranged for Jonathan to open Little Bridges that evening to practice on the stage piano and, coincidentally, let us in. Someone else went out and bought the thread. Everyone gathered in the balcony after dinner and began the work.

We weren't really going to connect every post with every other post. That would be unnecessarily redundant, someone was practical enough to realize. Connecting every post on each long side to every post on the other two sides should do it. It did.

We worked in pairs. Someone tied a thread to the baluster closest to the stage on one long side and walked, thumb on spool on pencil, unrolling thread and keeping tension, along the rail to meet someone else at the crossing, who ran the spool around the post nearest the near corner (twice, to maintain that tension) and handed it back to the first person, who took it back to the first post, wrapped it around twice and walked it back to the second person, who wrapped it around the second post from the corner, handed it back and so on, with the first person always wrapping around the first post and the second person working their way post-by-post across the balcony and up the other side to the post nearest the stage. From there the thread would be trotted back around to the second post from the stage on the original side and the team would repeat the