Learning To Be Quiet
When I was in college almost fifty years ago, I was a member of a fraternity at Cornell. In those days the University was woefully deficient in undergraduate dormitory housing for upperclassmen. I’m not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg in the equation (without dorms the need for fraternities was greater or with fraternities the demand for dorms was slack). Whichever was the cause and the effect, the reality was that there were fifty-four fraternities and if you assume a maximum of forty beds per house, there were in the vicinity of 2,100 undergraduate men that were housed there. I recall that my class had 2,800 matriculants, so if we simply multiply that by three (all Freshmen were required to live in dormitories), we get 8,400 of which I will guess 60% were male (today that number has shrunk to 46%). That means that 42% of upperclassmen lived in fraternities with probably at most 20% living in dorms, leaving the remaining 38% to live in private housing in the surrounding community. I cannot be sure of these statistics, but they sound about right and for the female part of the equation I imagine the % living in sororities to be much lower, the dorms and private housing therefore being greater. The point is that fraternity living for a Cornell male in the early ‘70’s was not only not unusual, it was more or less the norm.
I feel the need to say all that and analyze all that because being a “Frat Boy” is such a derogatory thing by today’s standards. Our fraternity, called Phi Sigma Epsilon was a chapter of a predominantly midwestern fraternity and was probably one of the least frat-like houses at Cornell in those days. We had a very inclusive membership process as evidenced by the fact that seventeen guys from our Freshman dorm floor joined the same house. They were glad to have us one and all and I know of no one that wanted to pledge that was blackballed or denied entry. We even had a joke song a few years later that went something like “We got ‘em all from Kurt Shellack to Peter Stahl” exemplifying the range from Arian Engineers to Jewish Pre-Meds that we proudly had in our membership ranks. We were relatively easy to liken to Animal House from National Lampoons great movie by the same name. Toga! Toga!
Actually, we had probably reached a nadir in fraternity rituals and pranks in those days of the post-60’s seriousness and most of us just thought of good old Phi Sig as just a convenient and economical communal living arrangement with a minor social angle attached. We were proud to have the highest Grade Point Average (GPA) of any fraternity in the Inter-Fratenity Council (IFC). But even so, we, like all fraternities at Cornell did have an occasional party. These were neither the raunchy keggers of the jock houses like Alpha Tao Omega (ATO), nor were they the sophisticated dinner parties of Chi Psi, or even the wild orgiastic body-painting parties of Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) fame. We just had parties with rock music and booze (drinking by 18-year-olds was still permitted then) and everyone tried to invite as many girls as they could think to invite.
While there was always talk of themed parties like a beach party in February where the dining room was filled with sand, mostly we were always looking for some idea or other to lend a thematic air to our otherwise unimaginative gatherings. One time we invited a caricature artist to draw a caricature of each brother to add to the Barroom array of similar caricatures (so even that idea was none too original). The way this worked would be that the subject would get head=sketched by the artist and would then be asked to leave the room for all the other brothers to tell the artist what that particular brother stood for, at least in the eyes of his fellow fraternity mates. Even if the brothers pushed into the salacious and raunchy elements of college life with their suggestions, the artist had been around the block and he knew that keeping it clean was mandatory since these would adorn the dining room wall for years to come. So, the idea was to be humorous and biting without being nasty and inappropriate.
I don’t even know what ever became of my caricature, much less what was on it other than that I was mounted on a green motorcycle, evidencing my most unusual trait, which was that I rode a green Triumph TR6R 650 motorcycle all over town (not totally normal in a town that seemed snowbound fully half of the year). But I do remember my roommate Gary’s caricature. We described a guy who talked a blue streak on any and every subject you could imagine. The artist had done this long enough and heard it all enough that he immediately drew Gary’s body as a phonograph (something that is easily recognizable in an 8×10 drawing), except this phonograph had an ON/ON switch suggesting that it was hard to shut Gary up. We thought that was hilarious and it obviously left an impression on me for me to remember such a random piece of trivia all these years later.
The even funnier thing is that I was considered the quieter one of the two of us and by any other rational standard out there, most people I have known over the years would call me anything but quiet. I am a storyteller at heart and I tend towards dominating the conversation no matter whether it is a social or business occasion. In these days of COVID social distancing this is certainly a liability for several reasons. It has occurred to me many times over this year that my enthusiastic storytelling might lead to too much expelled sputum, something I have noticed in the past that I am capable of doing and try self-consciously to control my spraying while saying. I recall seeing Dustin Hoffman playing Shylock in a London theater production where I sat in the first row and got a shower of elocution spit from the great man himself. No one likes being spit on, even by Dustin Hoffman.
And there’s another thing. We don’t see too many people these days, so when we have guests for dinner like we did tonight (two siblings with their spouses) it is hard for a natural storyteller like me to not want to talk and talk and talk. And therein lies my problem of the moment. I always liked Gary in college and we are still friends today, but I would never want to be accused of being that guy with the ON/ON switch. And here I am, finding myself spitting into a mask and talking, talking and talking. And the worst part is that I am talking about what I am focused on in the moment, which is likely very mundane to everyone but me. Even my poor long-suffering wife, who has to put up with me every day deserves a respite from that. So here is my Halloween Resolution (why limit ourselves to New Years?): Start learning how to be quiet….or at least quieter. Get off the phonograph and back on the Triumph, others will love you for it.