Protesting the closing of Sweet Briar (The Lynchburg News and Advance)
Well, mama says there is talk of closing down a school where she went for a year, Sweet Briar college, in Virginia. She has been reading about the difficulties they are having, and she has also been seeing how much support for the college has been stirred up about what was considered a ‘finishing’ school, but was instead a place of open-mindedness, adventuresome learning and creative thinking. Not to mention admitting one of the first black women to attend university in the south.
Mama did not want to go there. She wanted Reed, Stanford, anything other than a southern ladies’ university, but her parents had other ideas. Of course, she wasn’t as able to resist parental insistence as she was later at UC Berkeley, and it’s a good thing, too. Kids have to rebel. Kids want to think for themselves, need to think for themselves, need to make their own mistakes, not be shown every step of their lives how to place their feet, but mama says one thing is sure: she could have gotten more out of Sweetbriar even if someone else chose it for her.
She had a creative writing teacher, Evelyn Eaton, a known Canadian novelist, who marked over-the-top, pretentious, or simple too complicated writing with a huge red rubber stamp that said, “Woolly Muffle”,and a religion teacher whose class everyone wanted to take—he was handsome and kept a bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer. Mama did enter into things, like writing and directing what she now feels is a pathetic Freshman play, and she met some real characters there with names like Jingles Street and Ainsley Dinwiddie (they were real Loulous, mama says, haha), but she tells me that she has magligned Sweet Briar for years without really taking a look at what the college offered to young women. Perhaps it was more in keeping with mama’s spirit than she imagined, even if she imagined that a college should be co-ed!
Mama broke a lot of rules there, along with some other Texas women, but the time avoiding classes or events could have been spent better, she says, instead of weekends in Greenwich Village coffee houses smoking pink Vogue cigarettes and trying to look mysterious! (Haha, that’s a picture I wish mama would show me.)
Mama’s niece just sent her an article on Sweet Briar that moved mama to tears, some for admiration and some for regret that she didn’t see more and do more in that fateful year that seemed at the time like such an anomaly to her idea of education. She feels she could have let the sweetbriars prickle a bit more.
Well, live and learn, mama says. Youth has always been crazy and arrogant and disdainful of that which doesn’t fit exactly into its idea of the world, but that’s why, we hope above all that youth grows up–with more perception and understanding of where it went askew while it was testing youth’s troubled waters. I think mama just wishes she had swum out further…
Me, I can’t swim at all, but if I could, I’d head for the horizon.
See, I can be mysterious, too. I’m just not allowed in coffee houses.
It’s funny how when we are kittens we don’t know a good thing when we see it, but years later we think, hey, it wasn’t so bad.
Loulou, how about setting up your own Cat Café just for cats and owners? I see you in a chefs hat!
Luff
Mungo & Jet
Hey, happy to do it. But what would I serve in the Café? There is a page on my blog for recipes but there are only a few there when in reality mama gave me hundreds to put on the blog and I just haven’t had the time….