SAGE ADVICE: Byars remorse

By MARK SAGE/Columnist

I didn’t like it when they rerouted the road, lassoing the Tobias-Smyth cabin in asphalt. I didn’t like it when I heard Wiley would be getting an upgrade and might stop looking like a set piece for “Dead Poets Society.” And I for sure wasn’t excited about a three-story addition, green or not, to Byars Hall.
Byars, you see, is more sacred to me than even the duck pond or the chapel – put together. (Note: That might not be such a bad idea, putting the chapel and the duck pond together, especially if you stock the pond with trout. Think of the fishers of men you might net from that angling crowd showing up Sunday mornings hoping to land a native brook trout).
Furthermore, I’m willing myself to never like the Byars transformation no matter what. All old men need at least one utterly indefensible viewpoint that they hold for habit against reason. I’m hoping this will be mine and thus ensure that I make old-manhood. Only trouble is I’ve got a reason, a good one too, to not like the change. The story of my life loses luster once the old Byars back entrance, musty basement and hair-eating bathroom fans are celebrated, or worse forgotten, memories.
It was in Byars Hall, the old one, not this new-fangled thing, but not the old-old one, the 1995 one, that I met the girl I would marry. I’d signed up to be a writing center tutor. She signed her name under every one of my names. She swears she didn’t know who I was and I promise I had no idea who she was, but I did tell a buddy that I was going to marry her, just based on name alone. If you believe her she made no such pronouncements to roommates or friends. It took her, by her accounting of the story, a while longer, five or six days probably, to get up to that marrying moment. I could make a long story short by pointing out the obvious, that I married her, but where’s the good in that?
We worked together in a writing lab that few on campus knew existed, which means that we spent a lot of time talking. (Note to kids: that’s what us old folks did before Facebook, MySpace, e-mail or PlayStation). The two of us were memorably bad at being tutors of any kind, especially maybe writing, so the students who did know about the center tended to stay away when we were on duty, which means we spent even more time, sometimes time we didn’t even have words for, talking. And smoking. This was way before last year, remember, so I hadn’t quit yet. On those cold nights, when the ghosts were rumbling upstairs, when the wind was making you wish you’d picked the University of Florida as your first choice school, we’d sometimes sneak a smoke in one of the bathrooms. It was there that she caught her hair in a 1950s model exhaust fan and we laughed uncontrollably for the first time at one or another of us getting hurt. It’s a tradition that continues today. Go ahead and ask her how I nearly cut off my thumb with a hatchet. Once she stops giggling, she’ll tell you all about it.
Then, after the work was done and we’d locked the doors, verified that a smoke smell wasn’t too strong in the hallways and turned out a handful of lights, we’d go to Perkins. That was the only thing at Exit 7 except a cow field back then. Sometimes we’d stay there until the waitresses threatened to grab a steak knife and plunge it into our eyeballs. Other times we just walked down to my truck and I’d drive her to her dorm. Somewhere along that time, just before the snow started to choke the ground, making the old, musty, dark Byars nearly insufferable, we had our first real date. Five years later we married. No one can accuse me of moving too fast.
I guess I always knew that someone else would be walking through scenes from my love story. I knew, I guess, that that old building might need a new coat of paint sometime down the line, in the future, after I’m dead and gone. And I guess I knew that other students might make other memories there, even memories that conflict with mine. But I didn’t figure on them replacing the fan in the men’s room with a bottle of essential oils.
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