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Campus Menace

By Preston Shires

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Saturday, October 10

Normally, Saturday mornings rank just as high as a Sunday morning, even higher, when considering they're not followed by a Monday. But this Saturday morning lost all its promise at nine a.m., when Cambria Davenport came rapping at my chamber door, or rather at my chamber window.

It's not that I totally despise Cambria, she exhibits certain physical attributes that a young bachelor must not disregard. She's blond, but not in a fake way, has bright blue eyes, usually set behind the lenses of some thickish reading glasses, and possesses a prominent jaw that would make one suspect Habsburg lineage, except that it gives her a quality absent in the monarchical dynasty. I think it gives her a countenance exuding confidence, if not control,something no Habsburg could pretend once his portrait was in circulation. Underscoring her button of a nose, the forceful chin imperatively strengthens rather than diminishes her beauty. No, definitely not a Habsburg.

In any case, I was not up to seeing her commanding face peering in at me through a dusty, unkempt window glass in the wee hours of an October morn. I'd had my fill of her these past few months, starting with the first day of class, and I had decided to withdraw my feigned friendship, get out from underneath her threatening chin, and breathe a little. Yet there she was, knocking and calling out my name with no concern for neighbors.

It is true that the nearest neighbor in my village lives a good hundred yards distant, but you have to have heard Cambria's larynx fully exerting itself to appreciate my concern.

"Professor Telsmith!" she hollered, "open up!" A pause ensued so that she could hear her voice echo down through all seven hills of Brownville. "Professor Tristan Telsmith! Open up!" Another pause. "I can see you in there. Get out of bed and open up!" She pressed her chin and nose up against my window and let her eyes wander about my private quarters. "You can make your bed later. And why are your clothes on the floor?"

Propping myself up in bed, I glared at her. She looked somewhat surreal, her shadowy face haloed about by the rising sun behind her, all that could be seen in the flesh was the tip of her nose and chin. I knew I couldn't stare at her hard enough to make her bow her head humbly and slink away; so, beaten, I slung my legs over the side of the bed, grabbed my robe off the floor, stumbled into my slippers, and dragged myself to the front door. When I opened it, there she was as if she'd magically transported herself from the window to my doorstep in an instant.

"Professor Telsmith, is Tasia here?"

I was flattered. To think Tasia, who has to be the most widely appreciated female on campus, at least for her physical attributes, would have spent the evening in my company was quite a compliment. "I don't think so," I said slowly, looking at the kitchen area behind me as if she might be in the house.
Cambria peered round me to have a look for herself.

I really do believe that a kitchen tells more about a bachelor than does his bedroom. An unkempt bedroom may indicate that an energetic young man worked late and fell asleep exhausted before he could match trousers and shirts to clothes hangers, as much as it might indicate the habitual slacker. A sparkling kitchen, however, denotes the character of a man during his waking hours. The swept floor, the polished table, the knives affixed to the wall and ordered by size, the emptied dish sink, etc. all give witness to the presence of a conscientious and dutiful gentleman.

"I see Stanley's in town," came an utterance from the protruding chin below me.
She was right. Stanley is my housemate, paying half the rent and utilities and doing most of the work. The only room he doesn't attend to is mine and that's not for want of trying. I caught him just two days after he had moved in, picking up my robe from the bedroom floor. "Stop!" I ordered. "Leave it be. How do you think I'm going to find it in the dark if it's not the first thing my hand lands on when reaching for the floor?" Stanley, who's majoring in sociology, gave a dozen solutions to my rhetorical question, each one designed to improve my overall well-being, but I dismissed them all and a truce was formulated wherein my threshold marked our DMZ.

You wouldn't guess that Stanley was a stickler for propriety. He doesn't sit about in the evening in slippers propped up on an ottoman whilst laying back into the couch with a copy of Good Housekeeping between his thick mitts. No, he spends his evenings at the gym working out. I don't know why; I doubt a bicep can ever surpass the diameter of one's head, and both of his have already reached this limit. And he no longer needs the bulk to play middle linebacker for Aspinwall College's River Rats, (the River Rat being our mascot), given that his bum knee has sidelined him. I think it's a force of habit that he just can't shake, much like I would go on reading books, even if I lost my teaching position.

"Yes, he's back," I said slowly, drawing out the phrase as I spotted something.

"You know the dishwasher isn't quite shut all the way. That's going to bother him."

"She's gone missing," said Cambria as if the dishwasher meant nothing to her.

"She could have spent the night with someone, knowing her."

"I've already checked with all the likely suspects. I really didn't think she would be with you, but since she's nowhere else I figured maybe she got drunk and confused you with someone else."

"Makes sense," I admitted. "But how come you're the one running about looking for her? You two aren't especially close, are you, except in the way two boxers might be in a ring?"

"Jennifer came to my room looking for her around six this morning."

"Jennifer?"

"Her roommate. She said Tasia never came back to the dorm after the party last night, even though Franky saw her coming up from the direction of the Bookshire coffee shop about eleven-thirty. I told Jennifer I'd call the professors and then check with you. Why don't you answer your phone?"

"Because it's Saturday morning. And I'd love to carry on this conversation concerning Tasia's whereabouts, but I feel obligated to get back to what I was doing."

She gave me a snooty "Hmpff" before turning on her heels and climbing back into her aged Aveo and driving off.

I turned about myself, after sending the door home with a bang, and proceeded to boil up some coffee before sitting down at the table with a full cup to ponder a bit about Cambria and Tasia, two very different girls.

***


I discovered Tasia and Cambria back in August, when the semester began, in my Western Civilization class. I have some twenty students and pretty much free rein, even though I'm but a lowly adjunct, teaching three courses, if the dean favors me. My total income is pretty much dedicated to paying my way through to my PhD.

"I'm Mr. Tristan Telsmith," I said by way of introduction on the first day. I gave an up-beat description of myself, underscoring how hard I had worked to excel in academia, and leaving out the part about my parents. If I'd told them both my parents were successful lawyers who wouldn't let me, as a ten year old, watch an hour of television come Saturday if I hadn't read three books of their choosing during the week, one in history, one in science, and one in classical literature, the students might have claimed that I owed nothing of my success to my own endeavors. No, I focused on how I was a self-made boy, taking on a paper route when but twelve years of age. It was the only reason my parents would let me out of the study. "Will do him good," said my father, "to have some practical experience." That was my fun time, throwing newspapers at other peoples' front doors.


After recounting the hardships of childhood, I invited the students to introduce themselves one by one. I couldn't help but notice Cambria's demeanor, self-assured, but seemingly pleasant and poised on that first day. First impressions can be deceptive. She had given a short, confident, but self-deprecating autobiography, and it came as no surprise to learn she'd been homeschooled before attending a private high school, Parkfield Christian.

This delighted me. What a hand-rubbingly fun task I have ahead of me, I said to myself. I really ought to get to know this Cambria girl and bring her round to a better understanding of life. After all, such is the vocation of a professor. Opening up young minds so that they might see the world in the right light, that of academia.

Tasia, on the other hand, gave herself a less subtle review. Hers included her triumphs in tennis, her performance as a madrigal singer, her theatrical career, if high school drama qualifies as a career, and the highlight of her life, her successful debut in a beauty pageant. After going into the details of the contest and how she found it so hard ditching one of the judges who had fallen for her, I reminded the class in general and her in particular that we had but fifty minutes to get through all the introductions, the syllabus, and an amusing exercise for extra credit.

The word "amusing" caught Tasia's attention. She switched course like a beagle crossing a new scent. "Let's do the amusing exercise," she nearly demanded.
I straightened up to my full height which placed me well above my students, considering they were seated, and informed Tasia that due form must be followed and that the syllabus explanation held precedence. She objected, but I held firm, although I must admit that reciting course requirements on the first day seems a pointless exercise, as no student to date has taken heed of my delineation of points and due dates until the week of final exams, and by then it's often too late to bring a sunken grade to the surface. In any case, I successfully hit the syllabus highlights before embarking upon the amusing exercise.

"What I hope to do through this introductory exercise," I said with sufficient verve, "is to show you the problem of dealing with a subject of history known to us through primary sources. How do we know, for example, about Charlemagne?"

My students pondered this question blankly,as most had no idea what either a primary source or a Charlemagne was, so I explained. "Charlemagne was King of the Franks and later Emperor of the Romans. We wouldn't know much about him personally if it weren't for Einhard, a court biographer, who described Charlemagne's physical characteristics and personality. You might think, 'Well that settles it. Einhard told us exactly what this barbarian emperor looked and acted like.'" I proceeded to quote from Einhard's biography, where the enthusiastic author noted his "fair haired" hero to be "large and strong and of lofty stature" and habitually exhibiting a "face laughing and merry" that was graced with "large and animated eyes." Then, screwing up my own eyes, I asked the class, "But what if others had given descriptions?"

Feeling the uneasy weight of silence, Cambria spoke up. "We would know more."

"Or," I suggested, "we would be confused, and in the end, know less. Let's see what might happen if we were to write up several descriptions of a person. I need a volunteer, someone who doesn't care being written about; and we'll have all the rest of you play the part of Einhard. You'll write down a description of the volunteer and then I'll select a few and read them out loud."

I had learned not to offer myself as a volunteer. I had done it once and discovered that I was "a thin, shorter version of Clark Kent, complete with nerdy glasses, but someone who could never be Superman."

Tasia was up out of her seat in an instant and presented herself at the front of the class. "I'll do it," she said, shifting a chair about to face her classmates as if she were to sit for a royal portrait.

No one objected and all seemed to write enthusiastically. After collecting the students' descriptions, I shuffled through them. Those written in a characteristically male hand had to be edited. Especially the one ending with an odd tagline, "voluptuous, and I know where you live." The ones I did read proved my point. Did she have dark hair or brown hair or was she a brunette? One description highlighted the cute mole on her left cheek, none other mentioned it. "Very intriguing, your portraits," I commented in the manner of an art critic. "And I trust you'll appreciate the problem of eyewitness reports. One of you has Tasia with dark hair, another, brown. Now imagine if you just described Tasia in this way verbally and that's all. No written account. The person who hears dark may interpret black, and the one who hears brown might think her hair of a light brown or near sandy color. In no time at all, you have two Tasias. One with black hair and another blonde. So, it's important to get back as far as we can to the original primary source. If we can't, we must be aware that the testimonies we have are probably far from the truth. In this class, you will be history detectives, trying to sort out the original portrait."

***

I found the disparity between Tasia, with a disposition consisting of what a romance novelist might call a bubbly personality, and Cambria, with the cheerfulness of a prosecutor, interesting enough to share with my colleagues at morning coffee, which is ritually held each weekday morning in the chambers of Dr. Henry Langstrom.

"Homeschooled!" exclaimed Langstrom as he leaned back in his brown leather swivel chair, bringing his hands together in order to twiddle his thumbs. He looked up at his bookshelf as if reading off the title of his somewhat well- received work entitled When Constantine Invented Christ. "What a delightful challenge."


"I was thinking something of the same sort. Any suggestions?"

The three professors looked at each other encouragingly. The balding professor, Alfred Tate, let out a half-suppressed chuckle, and Professor Simeon, or Sim, Garfield followed suit.

"I had her in a class a year or two back," said Sim, "Introduction to Political Science. Hard to forget the girl. One of those types that sticks to your shoe. If she didn't make some statement condemning abortion once every fifteen minutes, she thought she'd wasted her tuition money. Myself, I thought her existence to be the best argument in favor of abortion."

"Open their eyes and you'll open their hearts," Langstrom said solemnly. He had a heightened interest in opening the minds of students, the blonde female students in particular.

"You should hold a Bible study," he continued, "and get her to attend. I've done that before, very rewarding." He turned to Alfred Tate, our drama professor, and recalled a girl some five years back, (three years before I registered for graduate classes at Kenosha U), who had been won over from the dark side. "She became the life of the party once liberated,didn't she Al?"

"She became the life of everybody's party."

"Listen, Tristan," Langstrom said in what one might call a professorial tone, "tell them you're starting a Bible study on Thursday nights. Tell them you'll give them extra credit for participating. You'll get all your 'A' students to attend, and I'm willing to bet," he continued as he clicked lightly away at his keyboard, "that, being homeschooled and willing to admit it...that she's of that pedigree "

He studied his computer screen. "What's her last name again, Davenport you said? Here she is, nothing but thirties for her ACT scores. Those are the overachievers, the ones who will take on extra credit assignments. God forbid that a footballer two points shy of a D would ever tackle one."

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