Quiet Spot on Campus

¶ … bicycles were supposed to be stacked neatly in the rack but they were piled in a heap as if students rushing late to class had simply thrown them down. The bicycles looked like toys left behind in a sandbox by children who have outgrown them and will never return.

The bench next to the bike rack needed to be repainted. The raw wood showed through the flaking paint, exposing splinters that would embed themselves in the legs of the unwary.

The birds that cluster around most spots where gullible students might like to feed them are absent from this particular bench, as if they too might be afraid of piercing their thin-skinned feet with the splintery wood as well. Or perhaps it is the fact that this bench is sheltered by no large trees as the other nearby benches are. This lack of shade in the summer and exposure to wind and wind in the winter no doubt account for the fact that the bench is so worn looking as well as for the general desolation of this niche.

It's true that the area is nice and clean with no piles of beaten-down autumnal leaves, but the effect of this lack of leaf and acorn and petal is sterile more than anything else. There is nothing that would draw the animal denizens of the campus to this place -- birds or squirrels or even the little green lizards that in the warmer months and out in the vines on the buildings.

On second thought, it is probably not that the students were late that causes them to pile their bikes on the rack with such haste. It is probably simply that they do not want to stay here any longer than they wish to.

This is not a lawn that would win any sort of a medal in a competition for the perfect suburban lawn. This is a lawn that is interrupted in a dozen places with tufts of clover, with eruptions of another small creeping plant that -- if memory serves -- in the spring will produce small, four-petaled flowers of such incredible delicacy that each strawberry-colored vein in every petal can be seen, penned in with the sureness of nature's hand.

At one end of this expanse of grass, now tuned golden in places by winter's shortened days, is a pile of bicycles. These bicycles are supposed to be tethered neatly in a rack, but they have somehow escaped from their constraints and lie in a pile of tangled rims like small children exhausted from play. They appear to be resting in a tangle of tired limbs that; once they are refreshed they will no doubt leap up once again to play whatever kind of game it is that bicycles play when their owners have finally stopped making demands of them.