A Meeting of the Minds, or Lack Thereof
It was my freshman year as best I recall the spring of 1997, when I met Mike. Of all places to meet him a psychology class seemed the most appropriate. It was early on during the class that Mike, Bruce, and I began talking in the back of the class. Anyone who knew any the three of us would probly laugh at the idea that we met in a psychology class. I think some people suspected and perhaps validly that we had all been patients in an asylum. Or at least that we were the subjects of some not so ethical experiments. This however was not the case.
Mike, Bruce, and I all sat in the back of the class talking during classes and frustrating the professor by knowing the material. I can't remember that doctor's name but I recall her love hate relationship with us. I have, for as long as I can recall, been an excellent student rather quiet and pretty docile. Mike and Bruce were both National Merit Scholars but neither of them had ever been particularly attentive. I must confess they rubbed off on me. We passed notes and made jokes like middle schoolers it was refreshing. But when asked something we always answered and we almost always answered right. There weren't many curves she could throw us.
I recall well one project where we were supposed to gauge reaction to odd behaviors. So Mike and I proposed to row across a parking lot in a shopping cart. The idea was to reenact the crossing of the Deleware, but with two guys in a Winn Dixie parking lot. (BTW Bruce didn't show up all that much so he wasn't a party to some of these ideas.) Nonetheless we were trumped on the crossing the Deleware concept by the professor. Somehow she found such an activity inappropriate if not dangerous.
Well to make the long story a bit shorter we passed. Mike and Bruce didn't even do papers but they passed lord knows how. We got thru and in the end I felt I had gained a friend. Mike and I walked to lunch after class together and just bs-ed. I was a kind of hanger on I guess but I managed to endear myself to the crowd. Bruce at the time was more of an outsider to me, quite beyond my understanding and rather bizarre. But Mike had become the first friend I had in Tallahassee, and for the first time I was feeling good about the place I was at.