I. Sunday night chapel felt like a death, that six o'clock pre-darkness worse than lights out, the weekend ending with chills and a sermon, our hastily showered hair freezing on the walk up, our rubber boots trudging under woolen coats with the slow gait of a funeral procession. The chaplain retired after sophomore year. We got a young theology student from Harvard who played Bob Marley on guitar instead of making us sing hymns, words drifting ethereally above our wet lonely heads. In the pews we dripped with lazy disinterest, the most homesick then, and the most displaced, feeling almost nothing we were supposed to feel -- only impatience, our toes numb, the untimely clanking of the heat drowning out the guitar with almost-comic discord. Most of us stared at the plaqued walls, the in memoriams of dead Miltonians, a boy who drowned before senior year, three brothers killed in World War II. Some of us scribbled swears in the hymnals with a half-hearted conviction.II.
Nina Riggs