THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701160038
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: JENNIFER DZIURA
LENGTH: 66 lines
A VIRGINIA BEACH girl writes home:
As the hemisphere enters the snowy sanctum of winter, I find myself at the very college Robert Frost attended briefly, left in disgust and never returned to. As I have not much cared for Frost, I have taken his judgment with a grain, perhaps a shaker, of salt, and I have observed my surroundings with unsullied eyes.
Frost is coming under reconsideration. Hanover, N.H., is what you might call a small town. In fact, Hanover is about the size of a town an impoverished child might build from his small collection of Lego bricks. The buildings support my choice of trope. Square and flat-faced, they look as though they were crafted by a child not only lacking many Lego bricks but also lacking creativity.
The smooth, synthetic white fronts of the structures look as though made from those extremely flat Lego pieces that are so much the bane of every child. Flat Lego pieces pressed hard to one another, so much so that no child's fingers would be able to pry them apart. Only a matrix of identical Lego windows interrupt the white Lego buildings.
The Lego village that is Dartmouth, however, is smothered in snow. At first, when the snow was new and fresh, it was fun to scoop it into a thermal mug, add Kool Aid powder (or Country Time Lemonade in a shortage) and eat with a spoon, imagining myself to be enjoying a crushed-ice confection at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront in the permeating heat of June. I can only fool myself for so long, however, and I soon grew weary of eating snow.
Despite the malicious winds that threaten to rip off one's facial flesh as though it were needed for a skin graft elsewhere, people here manage to swath themselves in flannel and fleece and make their way into the cold.
On Saturday nights, most of them are headed for fraternities, bastions of alcoholism and vice. The alcohol is transferred to the alcoholics in basements, where the floors are covered with a sticky, pungent substance Hippocrates might have mistaken for one of the body's four humors, probably phlegm.
Somehow, however, academics manage to persist.
In the circles I travel, this hallowed collegiate learning is a phenomenon entirely dependent on caffeine. Mountain Dew and Jolt cola are popular sources of the substance, but it also comes in tablets of various strength which can be washed down with black coffee. I have considered writing a cookbook containing recipes intended to keep the eyes open between 3 and 5 a.m. A few entries might include:
Alertness Aid No. 1 - Grind caffeine tablet with heavy object. Slowly stir into double espresso. Drink and repeat.
Alertness Aid No. 2 - Add Lipton blue-label iced tea mix to caffeinated water. (Yes, there is such a product.) Stir. Float three Vivarin on top for color.
Staying awake can be a very important matter indeed, for freezing to death in one's sleep - as do the birds who drop from their nests in the early morning like so much frozen food - is an intermittent danger. Despite the abundance of heat in the universe and its constant transference from object to object until eventual Heat Death, the College seems to have trouble channeling this heat into useful purposes.
The inhospitable cold makes me wish I had several rocking chair bound aunts whose highest purpose was to knit afghans and sweaters for my use. I am here reminded of Frost's words: ``Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.''
As I write from within the snow globe of New England, the matter hardly seems up for question. MEMO: Jennifer Dziura is a Cox High School graduate who now attends
Dartmouth College. You can reach her at dziura(AT)dartmouth.edu.