Summer of '94 take 2
Ok, so the summer of '94...I was living at 139 College Avenue/4 Warner Street (because the house was on a corner and had two separate entrances, it had two different addresses) that spring -- I'd taken over Chris Harmon's room, since he'd gone to Australia for his semester abroad. As I mentioned before, this house was a laugh-a-minute...anyhow, this was the semester I'd begun dating Catie D'Ignazio, and also the same semester I started taking classes with Tom Kaplan-Maxfield.
The class was American Transcendentalism, a small class of maybe 15 students. I believe it was in this class I'd also first met two gorgeous brunettes, Amy Hubbard (hubba hubba) and Rachel Stone. The class was a discussion-oriented, intimately-sized one format, complemented by Tom's great sense of humor and his core kindness -- it was likely one of the best classes I'd taken at Tufts. At the risk of sounding somewhat pretentious, I do think that the class format that Tom stuck with is likely similar to the academics of the Greek era, a time when academia was established and when the way education is meant to be was founded -- an open forum for discussion, under the guidance of a well-read, intelligent, open-minded, and well-humored instructor. Tom was interested in hearing our ideas and opinions as much as presenting his obviously better-balanced own. In short, he forced us to think and allowed us to express and listen to others' ideas openly -- a rarity in modern day university-level academics, in my opinion.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tom's classes, and, as I mentioned before, he is one of the only professors from Tufts I am still in touch with. He, a small group of other classmates, and I would often sit at Tufts' Campus Center to talk about all things life, and one of the topics that we would talk about was the topic of love/affection/sexual relations. I remember we had a lot of funny conversations, picking on Amy Hubbard (although, really just admiring how perfect her features were) and talking about Rachel Stone's aspirations to become a television sportscaster.
It was during this time I also had begun dating Catie D'Ignazio I mentioned before. Around then, Dave Tohill, who had the room right next to mine, had begun dating Natalie Wilson as well (we would refer to the times we both had our mutual girlfriends over the same night as "synchronized swimming"). I remember when I first introduced Catie to Tom, he referred to her as being fawn-like.
Also around this time, Elisa Gilliam/Madsen would often come to visit, since she was attending Bates College in Maine at this time. By an amazing coincidence, it turned out she was next-door neighbors with one of my good friends from high school, Jenni Matz, so it wasn't infrequent I'd go to visit her or they would come into Boston to visit.
Nevertheless, as the school year was coming to a close, our lease to our beloved 139 College was ending as well -- most of us had determined our respective abode for the following year (we'd decided to go separate ways), save for Dave Tohill and myself, since neither of us had decided our plans for the summer. It was then that Tom offered me a summer job, to help him as a carpenter -- Tom was a general contractor when he wasn't teaching at Tufts. With that determined, all I needed to determine was living arrangements -- at this juncture, Catie and I had only been dating for two months and the discussion of living together had come up, but we'd decided against it (she tells me to this day that I was the one that unilaterally decided so, but...). Irregardless, it turned out that an acquaintance of ours, Lilly Shapiro, was looking for two roommates in her house at 215 College that she shared with her then best friend Colleen Craig, so Dave Tohill and I jumped on the opportunity. It worked out well, since Jake Sherman was going to need a place to live in the following spring term, and Lilly Shapiro was going to be away that semester.
So came the Summer of '94...
Labels: Tufts
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Posted @ 01:03
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