Nothing much to say today. I found a notepad from Carthage College. Wonder if I should just use it. For notes. Would that be too parsimonious? Would keeping it be too anal? Small questions. In the bottom of the folder, I fish out a stamp, and look again at the letters. It's a .04 stamp. That's right. A four cent stamp. On first class mail. Then again, I think they all went by train. If I remember correctly, you had to pay extra to send it "air mail." I told you it was the dark ages.

Nothing much to say today. I found a notepad from Carthage College. Wonder if I should just use it. For notes. Would that be too parsimonious? Would keeping it be too anal? Small questions. In the bottom of the folder, I fish out a stamp, and look again at the letters. It's a .04 stamp. That's right. A four cent stamp. On first class mail. Then again, I think they all went by train. If I remember correctly, you had to pay extra to send it "air mail." I told you it was the dark ages.

A letter from Mary. Somehow, reading this one reminds me more sharply than ever how times have changed. Those days - they're beginning to sound like the 30's to me. The way the 30's sounded to us all in the 60's. Or maybe it's because Mary is reading Fitzgerald. "Tender is the Night." She says she has a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other, and she's just finished making love to a Mexican hair dresser. She tells of a New Year's Eve party at her parents' house, where our friend Kunze had two drinks and fell asleep on the floor in the den. My old friend Jan was there. I wish I knew where Mary was. Jan, I've found.

Maybe it's the innocence of it all. It doesn't really sound so different from the parties my daughter has experienced - or any of us, at that age. But - again I think it's the mention of Fitzgerald. And that she bought an album by the Clancy Brothers. Does anyone read F. Scott Fitzgerald anymore? Hemingway? Faulkner? Remember when the Clancy Brothers were cutting edge?

A folded sheet of paper with a quote from Plato printed in red ink. I thought at first someone else had written it, but looking at it, I am more and more convinced that this is my handwriting. I wonder why I copied this and saved it.

"Love - Eros - makes his home in men's hearts, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he can do no wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom love touches not walks in darkness."

Mid-Term Report, Carthage College, November 14, 1962. Good god in a gravy boat. They sent reports to my parents. And I was doing badly. How the hell did I ever end up graduating with a magna? Well, that was years later. This year, I'm getting a C in American History, B in Religion (Life of Christ), A- in Humanities, B in General Psychology, B in General Zoology (I wonder if this was when I disected the frog brain), and a C in Golf and Bowling. Yeah. Golf and Bowling. We had to take a sport. I was not a sport.