Chicken Soup for the College Soul

by Jack Canfield

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  I didn't know what to say. Margaritas seemed like such a distant thought now.

  I stayed for dinner. Jordan and I celebrated our last day of school together. In all those classes and after all that studying, I learned my most valuable lesson off-campus.

  Christy Calchera

  As told to Dan Clark

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  The Gift of Music

  I had been inside the prison called Gander Hill several times already by the time I met Ray in the spring of 1993. My father worked there with a group teaching inmates to improve their communication and speaking skills. I was a senior in college, majoring in speech communications, and eventually I started my own volunteer student group at Gander Hill.

  Teaching communication means getting people to tell their stories, but Ray could tell you how much he missed playing his guitar without speaking. Sometimes he moved his hands across the air as if he were playing his favorite blues scale. He always gave me a slight nod when he saw me come into the chapel for the meeting. He loved sharing his guitar stories. Although he had been an inmate at Gander Hill for over a decade, he always had a song in his head, in particular one that he said he had been writing in his mind since his arrival. He looked forward to playing again the way a child counts the days until summer vacation.

  When my group formally established itself at Gander Hill, the men were allowed a night of celebration to which they could invite one or two family members. The night of

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  the celebration was just like Christmas for them. They huddled with their loved ones, whom they had not seen or touched in several months or longer. Since his family lived in Texas, no one came to the celebration as Ray's guest, but he waited patiently for me to arrive. As he rehearsed his song in his head, I walked into the prison with a guitar.

  Ray tuned that guitar as if he were putting his life back into harmony. I have never heard a guitar tuned like that before or since. He looked at me over his shoulder and nodded a thank-you before bringing his song to life on the guitar. I watched Ray's fingers dance across the strings as if they were himself, running free. And for those few moments, he was.

  Brandon Lagana

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  Our Community

  One Tuesday evening in the beginning of the fall 1996 semester at Shippensburg University, sirens sounded. These sirens were not in celebration; they were a cry to the university that something was wrong. A house, only one block away, was on fire. Nine of the university's students lived there.

  From the minute the word got out that help was needed, it seemed like everyone showed up. The victims of the fire were offered endless invitations for housing for the night. The very next day, everyone got into gear to do their part in helping them. Flyers were posted with items that were immediately needed, just to get these students through this next couple of days. Boxes for donations and money jars were placed in every residence hall.

  As a residence director, I went before the students in my hall to ask them to do what they could. I knew that college students don't have much, but I asked them to do their best: ''Every little bit will help." I really didn't think they could do much. I was proved wrong.

  At the hall council meeting the night after the fire, my residents decided to have a wing competition, where each wing of the building would team up to see who could

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  bring in the most donations. I announced that the wing that won would receive a free pizza party.

  Thursday evening we announced over the PA system that we were beginning the wing competition. Within minutes, the place exploded. The single large box that I had placed in the lobby was overflowing. We quickly grabbed more boxes, and we watched in amazement as they, too, filled to the brim. Members of the resident assistant staff and I began to count the items. I was astonished by what I saw, and I was inspired by these kids.

  When we came to the final tally, the winners turned to me and announced that they would like to donate their winnings as well. They wanted the victims of the fire to have their pizza party.

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I had watched these students jump to action, work tirelessly and donate all that they could. And then, as if that were not enough, they handed over their reward. I was touched and so very proud of them.

  Christa F. Sandelier

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  7

  FRIENDS

  The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others.

  Grayson Kirk

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  The Kids in the Hall

  People love others not for who they are, but for how they make us feel.

  Irwin Federman

  When I started applying to colleges, I definitely had no idea what I wanted to major in, let alone what kind of career I wanted. All I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with math or science. So I researched liberal-arts programs and found myself at Emerson College in Boston, a school known for its music, television and theater departments.

  Because I'd been writing fiction since I was fourteen and had appeared in every school play since junior high, I thought I was more than prepared for what Emerson's brochures called a ''creative environment." But when I stood outside my dorm that first day in Boston and saw my fellow freshmen in all their vintage, multipierced, tattooed glory, I realized I was wrong. I suddenly felt about as alternative as Mariah Carey. All these intimidatingly artsy guys and girls, lugging crates filled with tons of CDs, paints and sheet music, looked like they had grown up on a different planet from me and my Gap-packers

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  back in suburbia. I was sure I would want to transfer before Thanksgiving.

  Back at my preppy high school in New Jersey, you could be labeled weird if you weren't wearing the "right" loafers. So when I started to meet the people who lived on my floorlike the girl with the electric-blue hair who walked around campus with a hand-carved walking stick and the sorceress a few doors down who said she practiced witchcraft and had dated Axl RoseI didn't know how to react. The strangest part of it was that a "normal" preppy girl like me was the bizarre one among all these eccentricslike someone wearing a bathing suit at a nude beach.

  After a day or two, I realized I was stuck at this freak show of a college, and there was nothing I could do but try to make friends. So I swallowed the lump in my throat and started classes.

  Luckily, the ones I started taking, like voice and articulation and creative writing, kept me busy and absorbed. Once in a while, I saw people in the study lounge who looked like they actually bought their clothes in a store instead of at a garage sale, but they were usually hunched over their computers for hours (wearing invisible but obvious Do Not Disturb signs). So I closed my door at night and quietly tried to recite monologues, draft plots for short stories and deal with one of my roommates, who was mostly interested in applying gobs of punky makeup to her face, looking in the mirror every second and going out to flirt with guys.

  At night, when I briefly left my room to go to the bathroom or use the vending machine, I began to notice that a scruffy little group (especially a guy who wore a wool ski cap twenty-four seven and a girl who was always draped in long, flowy hippie gear) would gather every night in the hallway. They held miniature poetry slams, played guitars and listened to discs I had never heard before. They talked

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  about human injustices in Bosnia and Tibet, while they lolled around for hours on the beaten brown carpet that blanketed the wide hallways of our one-hundred-year-old stone dorm.

  I didn't get these people. My high-school friends and I never read poetry together or jammed, let alone talked about politics. When we wanted to have fun, we went to the mall or saw a movie. And when we talked, we talked about guysor each other. It occurred to me that even if these people invited me to hang out with them, I wouldn't know what to say. "How late is the library open?" seemed rea
lly lame.

  But after a couple of weeks, I felt a little jealous of these people who weren't hyper about studying and were getting close enough to talk about everything. Through my open door, I heard them going on about silly stuff like their mutual love of roller coasters. Other times they'd be discussing their deepest family problems. Listening to them form their friendships in the dark hallway was like reading a good book: the plots and mysteries were unfolding before me, but I couldn't take part in the action.

  I don't know what possessed me, but one day when I returned from class, I started to sing "Blood and Fire" by the Indigo Girls superloud, straight from my gut, with my eyes closedand my door open. When I opened my eyes midway through the song, the guy with the ski cap was standing in the doorway. I was mortified that he had caught me singing about how life isn't worth living after getting dumped. But then I thought I might look like an even bigger loser if I couldn't finish the song. He stood there, absorbing me for a few minutes. Then, without a word, he walked away.

  It wasn't until I headed for the bathroom and heard him strumming "Blood and Fire" on his guitar that I waited in

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  his doorway and then mustered up the courage to introduce myself.

  The guy in the ski cap now had a nameMarcand he urged me to come and hang out in the hall that night. He played his guitar, and I sang softly, making up melodies and lyrics. I was so intrigued: Marc was unlike any guy I had ever met. The guys at home were either jocks or nerds. Marc was neither. In my eyes, he was a new kind of male species.

  That night he also introduced me to Monique, the longhaired, flowy-skirted girl. She played the cello and knew from the time she was, like, eleven that she wanted to be a filmmaker. She told me that when she was sixteen, she chained herself to the steps of her hometown theater to protest the local government's plans to tear it down. I couldn't believe it. Let's face it: while Monique was passionately involved in the cultural issues of her town, my friends and I were obsessed with Melrose Place. I felt shallow, but Monique didn't see me that way at all. She told me that she loved to listen to me sing and that my grave voice inspired her to take up electric guitar.

  Some of our other dorm mates began to join us in the hall, including Rob, a tall, beautiful African American guy who also had been too shy to hang out at first. Rob told us stories about growing up in New York City, witnessing drug deals and shootings. We both wanted to be writers, and we started writing goofy scripts about the other kids on our floor (our personal favorite: "The Witch Girl's Blind Date"). Rob turned me on to Coltrane, and the jazz saxophonist's unpredictable seductive recordings became my favorite hanging-out music.

  For the rest of our freshman year, Marc, Monique, Rob and I sat up late and talked for hours and hours. The best part of our friendship was that we worked hard on keeping it real. If I was pissed off at Monique, we'd talk about

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  it instead of doing that high-school, behind-your-back thing. And if Rob and I didn't agree on an idea or if I didn't want to go to the dining hall with Marc, they'd be cool about it. It didn't take long for me to tell the three of them all about mefrom my parents' divorce to my dreams of becoming a famous singer.

  But Marc was my favorite new friend, and I have to admit, halfway through fall semester, he had changed from my hall buddy to my crush. He would call me at 3:00 A.M. to try to lure me outside to sit by the Charles River (yes, we did venture out of the dorm). Sometimes he even called in the middle of the night just to read me a poem. Marc could find beauty in anythinglike a dance beat in a Madonna ballad that most people would denounce as cheesy or not even hear at all.

  Marc was open to everyone's ideas, no matter how wack. He was even respectful of some of the other dorm inhabitants who tried, with their Ouija board, to channel the one-hundred-year-old spirits who supposedly haunted the place. He would say, "Well, it's their dorm, too" and grin. I haven't met anyone as nonjudgmental since.

  It didn't take me long to realize that I was learning more from my new friends than from some of my lectures. Understanding and becoming friends with different types of people was the biggest achievement of my freshman year.

  Sure, I can tell you about the beginnings of Western civilization and how to write a speechbut the most important lessons I learned in college probably didn't take place during class. Those lessons were reserved for my dorm room.

  Suzanne Casamento

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  My Sanctuary

  It is three in the morning on a Tuesday, and I'm walking toward table eighteen, the one I call home. I pass the waiters, give a brief nod to the regulars and take my seat. I order the "usual," water and peanut butter pie. Yes, I'm at an all-night diner.

  I start to take out my books, knowing full well that I will be stuck on the same page of Socrates that I've been on for the better part of the semester. Of course, it's earlyfor my group that is. I wait for the empty chairs around me to be filled.

  Just as the Muzak songs start to repeat themselves, Shana and Jenny walk in. I am greeted with the usual big hugs and smiles. Suddenly, the diner stops being a twenty-four-hour restaurant with bad service and becomes my placemy home away from the prisonlike confines of my drab cell, a.k.a. my dorm room. For the next couple of hours, we will joke about people we know, talk about books, muse on the meaning of life, quote movies and create new private jokes. Table number eighteen is our inner sanctum.

  During my senior year of college, I started going to the diner for a reprieve from a dorm room that felt like it was

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  closing in on me. Not to mention the phones, the stereo and the computer. How could anyone seriously expect to have good study habits? Some friends of mine told me about the place; they went there to study, and they really liked it.

  So I tried it. It felt remarkably freeing. I started going there every night (except weekends, of course), and, believe me it was not because the pies were that great either. Maybe it would force me to pry open my books, and my grades would improve. Right? Well . . .

  But that's not the point. I mean, anyone who has gone to college knows that it's not only about forcing yourself to wake up at 7:45 A.M. (after you had gone to sleep two hours earlier) to listen to a professor spoon-feeding you information regarding the significance of the Battle of Hastings. It is also about finding a little haven where you can create what will be the most important thing in your lifeyourself. At a school of thirty-five thousand people, I found a small place that was as familiar to me as my Social Security number.

  That place was the diner. It was where advice on dating and anything else flowed freely. Where we would get nutty with exhaustion and no one minded. There was a time I spilled water all over myself, and we laughed until we cried. There were the victory laps over acing exams.

  Through laughter, tears, learning, growing and the occasional free ice cream, we found a sanctuary. A place where we could be ourselves.

  Eric Linder

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  My Friend Kim

  I'd seen her around campus long before I pledged the Kappa Sigma fraternity the winter of my sophomore year. I'd admired her from afarthe epitome of the untouchable college beauty. I'd decided that if I were forced to choose one perfect girl, she would be the one. Even though our paths crossed several times a day, I felt as if she lived in some remote corner of a distant universe. I was sure she had no clue I existed.

  She was there the night, several weeks into my pledge-ship, when I was invited to join the brothers at a local honky-tonk. A favorite band was playing that night, and I welcomed the chance to get out of my stuffy dorm room and away from the grind of studying.

  I arrived late and took a seat at a table alone in the back of the room. The others didn't notice me from their front row of clustered chairs near the stage, but I didn't care. I was in no mood to socialize with the same slave drivers who made me scrub the floors and take out the trash. I made a pact with myself to hang out for fifteen minutes and then beat a hast
y retreat.