The above photograph is a student looking out of my dorm room window.

I see on TV shows and movies that the freshman and sophomore years are for partying, bashes, spring breaks, and kegger parties. Not for me, but I was a serious dude. After my TBI, I had only one goal, gain knowledge, but I did crash one neighboring frat kegger party, when a young coed asked me to go with her. "Come on, it will be fun" she said. It was directly across the street from her dorm, and besides, it had the only "Pong®" game in the town, and I was a familiar face in their frat. It was pretty much open to every student, a member or not. We went, mingled and drank, listened to the band, and pretended to be a couple, as to not stand out. The deeper we go into the masses, around the old Mill Race, the easier it seems to blend in with them all, there were hundreds in attendance, then some dude comes up to the mike and says, "We have some uninvited people, and believe me if we find you we are going the throw you in the mill race. We looked at each other and nodded in agreement. It was best to slowly work our way out of the party, but not before grabbing some snacks. When we got out she giggled, "Whew! That was close."

Some of the young ladies who lived in one of the Burk Dorm houses, in the mid-1970s. One would become my fiancée...and we broke up a year and a half later, and she is mid-way up the stairs in the foreground in a model's pose (photo digitized, from one of my annuals).

I had several female friends, but on a Christian college the gals were not going to openly want to have sex, that was a given, and well with the men there was a double standard, but you still didn't want to get caught having premarital sex; I know, right in the free love era of 1973 in the capital of Hippy Central, we were in a seemingly no sex goes zone. But that didn't stop anyone from doing it, they just had to be careful not to get caught; t was a hide and seek thing. We'd make out in small niches, in sacred nooks, like a prayer room, and then off went the clothes; well removed them, but can't speak for others, and with several we did it adventures for couple for heavy petting, moaning, and French kissing in private. We'd go onto the Universities campus and literally make out in the rhododendron bushes at night. What can I say, we were young. The hormones were raging in both sexes. Really, even in a Christian setting they didn't out right forbid sex, we have to reproduce somehow, right? We weren't supposed to be caught, but we put an engagement ring on our fingers, moved off campus, and it was A-Okay.

Freshman year it was mostly studies. I was literally overwhelmed with homework. One prof wanted a thousand word paper, a single spaced paper between each week's classes, type written. In those days, every typo meant either ripping the paper out of the typewriter, or I used whiteout to fix the errors. If you were rich, you come to school with an IBM Electric-Selectric on your desk that would provide the whiteout on a tape for you to magically correct the mistake. It was time consuming, and difficult. So many of us ripped out the paper and tossed it in file number thirteen. After three months I adjusted to the work load that I thought would kill me at first, and believe it or not I had time to play. I started to play inner mural softball, track, and touch football. I know the last one is nuts for a TBI survivor, but then the doctor just said, "Go live your life," with no restrictions. So I did, and I also hit the weight room. I muscled up. I would work out three times a week for an hour, and I was solid muscle. One girlfriend said, "Olan, I don't want you to become muscle bound. It won't look nice on you." So, I eased off. I came home one summer and thought I'd challenge my father to an arm wrestling match. I was going to show him. He had me down in a few seconds. I walked away, and thought, how did that old man do that? In his 60's he was as strong as an ox, I didn't know there was a trick to it, and he'd had lots of practice time during WWII; no, here was a young whipper-snapper that was taught a lesson he won't forget.

My first year was rough in this college that demanded you show them what you know by writing it, and I made C's. It was frustration for me and my faculty advisor who knew I should be getting A's, but I kept on charging ahead. I had a mission, C's be damned. I would get A's at the University of Oregon, so I had my self-esteem. Math was a lost cause, and I wasn't good at it in the first place. My Grandma, a teacher, wasn't good at it, but Mom excelled at it. My left brain had suffered a contusion from the TBI, so I fell back on that excuse to make me feel better, but math was easy in physics, and geometry was simple. I'm just not accountant material. My super power is art, I thought, and here I am separated from my paints, easel, and brushes. I began to feel for the first time some mood swings. Nothing drastic, but by 1974, I began to write poetry, and it showed up in them. My faculty advisor that year was also the poetry teacher and I complained that I didn't have tools for painting, and she said, "I'll teach you to paint with words." She started me out with the tight restraint, the haiku. The following haiku was written in 1977, and first published in 2010 on the website Original Poetry:

aiku: Caged Bird

c. 2010, Olan L. Smith

A bird caged, its wings

Clipped back can no longer soar

Among high breezes.

I would continue to write, and I brought my tools for painting to Eugene, now that I had worked out a schedule. My GPA would not improve, only averaging a 2.9, but I knew the next stage of life the college had trained me well. As though speaking to me, one of the professors stated that a C student was more successful than A students out of their graduates, according to a study they'd run. I will talk more about college in a future part of my memoir. Education is just blocks of information in a person's life, basic blocks; you have elementary portion, high school quota, college quota, and post graduate blocks. Not having these "building blocks" doesn't mean you're dumb. It just means you don't have them. You can learn it on your own, my father did, Walt did, my mother did, and they did well, and they were all high IQ people. An employer looks at your resume, and he or she may assume that if you have these learning blocks you have a commonality with everyone, and they don't have to re-teach you the basics. It means you started something and you finished it; they like to see that you had stick-to-it-ness, and that is what they are looking for; they will train you in their specialty on the job.

I wrote the poem, "Dreamers" in about 1976 while I walked on campus, and per instruction from my mentor I kept a notepad, pencil, and a pocket thesaurus with me at all times, so that when inspiration hit I could jot down the idea. This was the result, and it was first published in "Alura Poetry" in Vol. X No. 2 Fall 1985.

Dreamers

©1985, Olan L. Smith

Don Quixote your thoughts are in me

And my laughter in you

For we are one in thought and deed.

Let people talk, their tongues are as vipers;

Their words roll like shining pearls.

The crowds gasp at our antics

And their eyes gleam with pride,

While we see them as they are—

Knives fastening us to a wall for inspection,

The crowds spit and laugh as we pass,

They cry out, "Dreamers!"

But oh, Don Quixote—

Where can we not ride?

Where can we not go?

"When Cotton had no Dough"

©2012, Olan L. Smith

In college Cotton and his gal

Did it where they could

While in his car, in a bar,

In a fountain or on a mountain.

They made love in the bushes

In a temple [not quite so simple], in a lurch or in a church

They made love in a courtyard or in the graveyard—

She'd be downward bent when they did it in a tent.

Shagging on a bench during the ninth inning was a cinch;

They did it in a restaurant, the waiter was not remiss

When he asked, "What are you looking for, Young Miss?"

He felt a nibble when they did it on River Beach; thank God it was not a leech.

They did it behind the prayer room door on the library's second floor

And when finished she'd proudly march out the door.

At a museum she'd giggle walking around an exhibit's lance pushing down her pants

That's how they did it with no dough not so very long ago.