She was from the jungles of Brazil.
No town or city name.
My feeble attempts at conversing bore no fruit, but when our gaze met, everything else, and I mean everything else, melted away. There was nothing in this world more important than finding my way next to her and her round, warm body.
She was easy to find; her dorm was the one that had Latin beats.
She had earned a scholarship/fellowship in Global Conservancy and was here at this private Midwest university for one more year before heading to Oxford.
Yes.
That Oxford.
She drove me to Chicago for a very cool weekend of warehouse blues.
I really shouldn’t be doing this I vividly remember saying.
I had a final exam to take on Monday morning.
In Geology.
I started out great in the class, and actually got quite adept at differentiating the different rocks, minerals, et al. But I didn’t study one bit. The whole semester long.
We watched a blues band from the southside play until 3am and we drove back to campus, arriving at 4:30am.
It was panic time.
Not because I was going into this crucial final exam with no sleep, but just as we turned and headed home, Zula gave me some homemade sweet berry-syrup drug that she said was “kinda like mescaline. Just to keep us awake” as we headed directly into a bad snowstorm.
It was the best-tasting potion and it reminded me of boysenberry pancake syrup.
I should have known.
Homemade.
I remember counting the individual snowflakes as they floated down from the cold dark night. I thought I counted them all by the time we pulled off the interstate.
I think Zula was saying something to me as I tumbled out of her car onto the parking lot pavement.
I think I studied, or attempted to cram all fourteen weeks of study, into a very easy to understand mental picture which I would brandish like a knight’s sword when the Blue Books were opened and the fiercely-contested exam began.
In two hours.
I was doing surprisingly well with the written intro and I was starting to really feel like I would be able to pull this off in my impaired condition.
I looked around the room, at all the fools who read the book, studied and practiced for the exam, and thought what a bunch of suckers!
Hubris.
Then he assigned us each a box of different rocks, sediments, minerals, and crystals, and each color was melting before my eyes into a rainbow river!
I knew I was in BIG trouble.
Going into the last week of class, I had a mid-nineties average, so I just needed to pull a decent “B” down the stretch to ace the class, but no!
Dumbass.
I really gave it some thought before I walked up to the professor, handed him my incomplete Blue Book, and he probably wondered why I had the biggest shit-eating grin he ever saw on a student who just failed the final.
I didn’t wonder why he gave me a “D.”
Stay well.
