9.

My best friend in the whole world decided, after our senior year of high school, that he would go to Trevecca Nazarene University instead of Olivet Nazarene University, and I never really forgave him for it. He was still my best friend though, and he had been bugging me for the past four years to come visit him at Trevecca. I suppose it was only fair; he had come to spend an afternoon with me at Olivet one day on his way home. Now Jon and I were here, and I would be surprised with what I saw and what I learned. It gave us a weird feeling, driving away from campus the next day, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first feeling I had was weariness, because I felt like the night should be ending soon and it was not. We drove into Nashville and found Trevecca and Derek and somehow there was still stuff to do. We met his girlfriend and his roommate, we toured downtown Nashville in Derek’s Jeep Cherokee, and we saw the curious blend of grit and glitter that was the city, complete with some prostitutes that I didn’t notice until Derek pointed them out to me. We stopped a Coco’s Coffee Shop and stayed just long enough to decide that no one wanted anything. Besides Trevecca, downtown Nashville houses Vanderbilt University, and it was strange brushing shoulders with students from there in the coffee shop. It was certainly a step outside the Olivet bubble. Derek told us that he would on occasion drive into Vanderbilt’s campus and randomly ask girls for directions as a ploy to get a date. Ladies and gentlemen, my best friend Derek.

I went to bed that night on the futon in Derek’s crappy apartment, confident that Olivet was better than Trevecca in every conceivable way. (I was rather smug about the condition of Derek’s apartment. The whole complex was rather dilapidated.) There were birds chirping out the window, and Jon and I couldn’t decide why they kept at it in the middle of the night. I thought it was just because we were down south, that there was some species of bird that stayed up all night; Jon thought it was because we were in the city, that the lights fooled the birds into thinking it was perpetually daylight.

In my notes for that night I recorded that we watched Derek get a haircut (which I don’t remember) and that we went off-roading across the lawns and curbs of the tiny campus (which I do). I also have written down “Luke’s joke” though I have no idea at all what that means. Apparently someone named Luke told a joke that night, and apparently it was funny enough that I recorded it and figured I would remember what it means. I don’t, and if Jon doesn’t either then it will forever remain a mystery.

* * *

The thing about going new places is that sometimes you learn or see things you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes you’ll learn something that will bring into question a decision you made and cast the course of your life into serious doubt, at least for a time.

Jon and I both experienced that curious form of melancholy on our second day at Trevecca. Derek went to class and we wandered the campus, feeling rather on the outside of everything, wondering if this was how visitors to Olivet saw our own school. We were waiting for Jon’s grandmother, who lived in a retirement home on the campus, to get home. Jon wanted to at least stop in and see her before we got on the road again.

As we wandered the campus, Jon reflected on the decisions that had led him to Olivet. Apparently Trevecca had always been his first choice, and something about the tiny campus, the manicured lawns and the stone buildings seemingly dropped in the middle of a less-than-glamorous section of Nashville, made him question his change of heart. He said that he hadn’t wanted Olivet but that God had chosen it for him. I nodded and tried to be supportive and was a bit hurt that he would so easily question the past four years that had been our college experience.

That was before we met Cyrus Poor, the physics professor and head of Trevecca’s science department. I knew there was a derelict observatory on the roof of Trevecca’s science hall, and I wanted to see if there was or had ever been a telescope in it. We stopped by a secretary’s office, explained who we were, and then waited around to meet the professor. It turns out there wasn’t much in the dome other than a Celestron of the same type that we took out for field work at Olivet, but apparently Trevecca has (and had had for the past four years) a physics program in conjunction with Vanderbilt University. It was a five year program that ended with not only a bachelors but a masters in physics. I asked Cyrus why I had heard nothing about this. He explained that the administration wasn’t too keen on supporting the science program. They focused primarily on religion.

I felt sick. More than that, I felt rather angry and betrayed. I didn’t really have anyone to blame; I hadn’t really done any serious homework on Trevecca when I was looking for colleges. Still though, it seemed to me that someone at Olivet, when I explained my goals to them, should have told me about the program at their Nazarene sister school. I don’t know if it would have changed anything, but it was an option I had no idea I had, and it made me depressed.

I tried to shrug it off as we went to visit with Jon’s grandmother, but when we drove out of Nashville we both felt that we were driving under a cloud.