Where's My Bed?

You can get pretty disoriented, pretty easily see the Past melt into Present, like watercolors in the rain. Writer and speaker Kurt Vonnegut used to say he had one thought only when he returned to his home town of Indianapolis: "Where’s my bed?  Where's my bed?”It’s how I feel every time I go back to Smith where I went to college.I was there two weeks ago for the big Women in the Media conference.  Many luminaries came, the news director at National Public Radio, the woman who got to spend three hours with Jackie Kennedy in 1960, and who rode in a limo with Ringo to get the story for Life Magazine during one of the Beatles' first trip to the US.....Gloria Steinem was supposed to be there and offer the keynote - yes she's our too I’m proud to say, as is Betty Freidan and Ann Morrow Lindbergh and Terry Marotta ha ha – but Gloria felt she had to be at the bedside of her good friend Wilma Mankiller,  a feminist in her own right and the first female chief of the Cherokee nation who died last week at 64.But when I see that campus! When I see those trees! Even now when on business I find myself passing through Northampton, a town so cool Tracy Kidder wrote a book about it, I always go straight to the campus, change into a pair of jeans and sit under one of those trees. None of the young women look at me funny. They see me the way I saw each of them: as a sister.But talk about 'Where’s my bed?' There are days like the day I am having today when so much is whirling and  so much ending that I still yearn for that little room under the sloped ceiling in the ancient house where the college was born, all 14 students and the faculty living there together. There are the old elms up above and down below here is  my little room freshman year. I walked down to the Five and Ten and got that weird gold cloth for 35 cents a yard to make the round pillow, which I found so beautiful. Then, because a child without money never knows when to stop, never knows when it’s too much, I also covered the lampshade with the same stuff. That’s how you knew me in high school: the girl with the problem bangs whose blue plaid headband matched her blue plaid skirt. Ah that callow hopeful girl: Where is she now? Where is my bed?