Memory Lane

On Saturday Trish and I went to the Southern Christmas Show in Charlotte.  Just about everyone in the world was there...and there was a car in the parking lot for each of them! We did have a good time looking at things and doing a bit of Christmas shopping.

On Sunday we were to travel to Burnsville, NC, for this week of work.  On the way we passed by Davidson College, where I was an undergraduate student more than fifty years ago. So, we stopped for a while so I could take Trish on a little walking tour of some of my old haunts.

The main front part of the campus is much the same as we walked under the big  beautiful oak trees that shaded the campus well even when I was a student here.  We walked past the Literary Halls and the Fine Arts Center, a place where I spent much happy time working with theatre productions under wonderful Dr. Rupert Barber.

Taking Trish around my old campus.

We walked along the row of old dormitories so I could show her my freshman dorm, then called East Hall but now renamed Sentelle.  I could show her the exact window where my room was.  We then went next door to my favorite dorm, Duke, where I had a single room for three years.  It was a third floor room with windows that opened out onto the flat room of the wing below.  I had a secret private deck out there for sunning and reading.  I thought it to be the finest room on campus and it was my home for the majority of my college career.

Duke Dorm, my home for three years.

We looked at beautiful new buildings that one could not have imagined fifty years, especially the Student Center and the Little Library.

After our campus walk we checked out Main Street so I could show her where I went to the barber shop of Hood Norton.  We even ate at the Soda Shop, back then called the M and M after Mary and Murray who ran it.  I ate the same cream cheese and olive sandwich on toasted white bread that I had loved as a student.

Inside the Soda Shop everything looked exactly the same.

Our last stop was the Copeland House, in the old days Mrs. Copeland’s Boarding House, where I ate along with about a dozen other non-fraternity “friends.”  When we gathered there for meals it was like the bar scene from Star Wars.

Mrs. Copeland’s Boarding House, where once a strike of lightening threw a dead squirrel through the window and onto the dining table.

Along the way Trish and I realized we were visiting two different places: she saw Davidson in 2019 while I saw very clearly Davidson in 1962.