City Lights

I had twelve good years of schooling before I thought I would venture out into the cold
air--thick with knowledge under my dark velvet lapel--and onto city streets in the golden
Autumn. Dreaming of that city, I nurtured a nestegg of money, so as to catapult me
into the crowds, bookbag strapped to my back, learning about life.

The first time I saw Carnegie Library, the leaves crackled, the wind blew, my madras
poorboy hat flew away on a city bus ride into Fifth Avenue. I had expected
nothing less than yellowed pages of mentors, feathered by a thousand and one students,
the catalyst for the good life, a perfect job, perhaps, a shining lifestyle.

It was right there, at that very spot, on the steps of the Cathedral of Learning that I
traveled back into time, dazed by the height of that building, a cock in the sky, lit up
at night like a galaxy for scholars. Even from the Mezzanine level of West Penn
Hospital, where scratch surgeons go down in history, you could see the Cathedral.
What a tower of strength!

If I time-capsuled my memoirs, I could always go back to the days of yore, when
flower-power, yuppies and local politics raised the roof of the GSLIS building, a time
when I brought out my guitar to strum songs of peace and love on the lawn out there.
Finding God. But it had to be ten years later, when I was thirty-one, that I met my
dear girlfriend, the Vamp from NYC, a strong resemblance to God, a wider shade of
pale from the women’s lib movement in her pocket, that I cut a better course and
mellowed. I had never seen such fleet feet from Nebraska, a mid-western Swede
with her own ideas. It was exactly then, that I loved city lights, those that lit up the
streets for Emmett to play Street Band music and cause Lou’s Bar to be flooded with
people and poetic vagabonds lurk in the bookshops just behind the pencil and
paper of yet another cluster of deep minds.