El Proximo Paso

My son has now just finished his first semester of second year of college, and liked only some of it. He took Chemistry, and Anthropology, and Precalculus, and Psychology, and Spanish 301 -- El Proximo Paso -- because he took lots of Spanish in high school and traveled a bit. He moved into off-campus housing instead of the dorms, and is learning about bachelor squalor and paying bills. What we used to call sophomore year. It continues to surprise me, as it has since he was born, how always I compare his experience to mine and find myself reflecting at every age on the differences between us. It is like having two children, the real one and the ghostly one of my memories.

In my first semester of sophomore year I took Chemistry for Mankind (not for science majors), and Economics, and third-semester French Lit. I took lots of French Lit because I had to take some lit classes and was able to take them all in French, because I had taken French in high school and picked it up quickly and had traveled a bit. But I never lived in the dorms. In my first year at age seventeen I lived in grad student housing on Spring Street, which shocks my son who tells me what a slum that area is now, a single room in a slab of international style private dormitory that was possibly ten by twelve feet including the closet. But I digress. I was talking about the first semester of my sophomore year.

My third semester, following Early & 17th Century, and 18th-19th Century, was 20th Century French Lit. We read L'Etranger by Albert Camus, L'Immoraliste by Andre Gide, Sartre's Les Mouches, some mimeographed copies of selected surrealist poetry, and some Beckett and Genet in Panorama du Theatre Nouveau. We read de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une jeune fille bien rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) and I wrote a three-page biographical paper in bad French that concerned the correspondences (as another poet had it) between my emotional states and the local weather, during my family's move to California when I was in high school.

I had already taken Psychology, which was supposedly my major, a beginning course that had put me off by being all about neurology and visual perception, instead of about symbolism which was what I was more interested in at the time.

So now I have to dig through old notebooks and journals to find what would have filled out my twelve to fifteen class hour credits for that semester. Memory is tricksy. I find that was the semester I also took my first Spanish course.