The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray Read Free Book Online

you think you doing, freshman? And I said, Being very fresh and very, very mannish, and she said, See there, what I heard was true. I was still holding her hand and I said, I hope so the way you signifying.
    There was also the one who was a junior, no less, from Pittsburgh. She worked in the library and sometimes she was the one at the main circulation desk and after several weeks I could tell she was curious about me and I thought it was because of all the time I was spending at the table in the corner by the rubber plant. So as good-looking as she was, I pretended that I didn’t really see her even when she was the one stamping the checkouts. But then one day she said what she said and that was the beginning of that.
    You sure had me fooled, she said, and I said, Who me? How? and she said, Here I was thinking that you were kinda cute to besuch a bookworm and come to find out you’re rooming with the Snake of all people, and I said, What’s wrong with that, and she said, He’s so stuck on himself he goes around acting like he’s God’s gift to women, and I said, I’ll settle for being God’s gift to you, and she said, Well if you aren’t the freshest freshman yet. So when her regular boyfriend went on trips with the football team and then the basketball team, she was the one.
    That was the kind of on-campus action my roommate and I had going for us that first year, and I still don’t know how I got away with it all without ever being called Little Snake or Snake Two or Snake Number Two or the Lizard or the Eel or something like that. Somebody was forever saying that we were two of a kind, but I was known as but not addressed as the Other One.
    So much for Doctor Faustus as far as just about everybody else was concerned. But as pre-sophomoric as it probably sounded to an upperclassman coming as it did from a newly arrived freshman, I still think it was a pretty good analogy because what I really meant was the fact that my roommate was the first student I ever met who really believed that everything you studied in a classroom should become just as much a part of what you did everyday as everything else. To him, nothing was just academic stuff, so as far as he was concerned, there was no reason whatsoever why you shouldn’t know just as much about the fundamentals of any course in the curriculum as any student who had checked it as the major for a degree. After all, as he had already said as he unpacked his books, the very best undergraduate courses were only a very brief introduction to some aspect of the plain old everyday facts of life that were just as important to you as to anybody else.
    Which is why you never knew what his side of the room was going to look like when you came back at the end of the day. Or, for that matter, sometimes when you woke up in the morning. As often as not, the drafting board would be flattened out into a work table and rigged up with whatever equipment he’d have come byfor whatever exercise he had underway. One day it might be a makeshift chemistry laboratory. The next day it might be set up for a problem in physics or biology, and when he was reviewing some historical period, he sketched his own maps, and he always got a special kick out of making his own war room mock-ups and outlining the strategies and retracing the maneuvers of the crucial battles of the great army and naval commanders.
    During the second week of classes he had picked up the footlocker now under his bed from a senior in the building trades and that is where he stashed his special equipment, including not only his drafting kit and surveying and mapping instruments, but also his 16-mm camera, binoculars, and the parts he was already accumulating by mail order for the amateur radio set and the model airplane he was to build and operate from time to time that next spring.
    Meanwhile, by the middle of October he had begun a window greenhouse project that he always found time to keep going full swing no matter