I call back, holding Back in the World in my hands. For what seems, in chagrined memory, like eighteen hours, I tell him all of my ideas about Art and list all the things that have been holding me back artistic-development-wise and possibly God!
I do that myself, once I hang up. One day I walk up to campus. It is somehow mind-blowing, this notion that the people who write books also, you know, live : go to the store and walk around campus and sit in a particular office and so on. Doug shows up and invites me in. We chat awhile, as if we are peers, as if I am a real writer too. I suddenly feel like a real writer. Heck, I must be a real writer. Only out on the quad do I remember: oh, crap, I still have to write a book.
After the orientation meeting the program goes dancing. Afterward, Toby and I agree we are too drunk to let either him or me drive the car home, that car, which we are pretty sure is his car, if there is a sweater in the back.
There is! I wake, chagrined at my over-familiarity, and vow to thereafter keep a respectful distance from Professor Wolff and his refrigerator. I sometimes go into his office and we just, you know, talk about my work. I start dating a beautiful fellow writer named Paula Redick, who is in the year ahead of me. Things move quickly. We get engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands.
Toby takes Paula to lunch, asks if she is sure about this, the implication being, she might want to give this a little additional thought. At a party, I go up to Toby and assure him that I am no longer writing the silly humorous crap I applied to the program with, i. I go forward and lose all of the magic, for the rest of my time in grad school and for several years thereafter. We first-years are a bit tight-assed and over-literary. We are trying too hard.
