Certain memories continue to fascinate me. I find myself conjuring these memories often lately — images, settings, scenes from summer 1968 through fall 1977, involving Northwestern and the galleries of Chicago’s Art Institute,. Like some (most?), my real life began upon finishing high school and leaving home — for me that meant enrolling and moving into a Northwestern dorm just weeks after graduating from Ridgewood. Now, thirty years later, in this month of beginnings,� March 2007,� just days until the first day of spring, I am finally putting in writing and found images what until now I have only inwardly, privately, thought, felt, and seen. It feels good to finally share.

I think of Emily Dickinson’s choosing a “certain slant of light,”� to communicate what must have been a most private, obscure feeling. She clearly hoped� someone, somewhere, somehow, sometime similarly had contemplated a ray of light hitting a rug, floor , hosting a myriad of glistening, floating, drifting dust crystals. There is a certain light that colors my memories of Northwestern and Art Institute — memories of the years in which I first began to dream dreams. And the “certain slant of light” that illuminates these memories are no small part of the memories and feelings themselves.

The places with which I became familiar and intimate during those years, the places that came to carry these feelings were each glimpses into what were to me amazing places created by the already achieved and accomplished. My setting foot in them somehow made me feel connected to great possibilities: the Lunt Building classroom where I took differential calculus from Professor “Ma” Clark; the large reception lounge on the second floor of Scott Hall, filled with dark red, green, and black leather chairs and couches, and long, oak reading tables, incandescent reading lights, shaded lamps on the end tables, high, high ceilings, arched stained glass windows; the Tech Library study carrels reached via narrow� spiral metal stairs ; the reception lounges of the Alice Millar chapel — good for many hours of studying;� the study carrels in the Seabury-Western seminary library; the Impressionist galleries at the Art Institute; the Bahai Temple in Wilmette; and the Shakespeare Garden.

Above are pics of Scott Hall and Lunt; here� is Alice Millar Chapel. Emily would have loved its organ and the slanted stained light that illuminates its pipes and keys.���

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