JULY 23, 2023 – (Cont.) So it was that in early September 1968, I joined 99 other “young men” from around the country (though mostly from the Northeast, despite the school’s attempt to achieve broader geographic diversity) in . . . wearing a coat and tie to all classes and sit-down meals served by student waiters . . . avoiding demerits by arriving at class ahead of the “master” but not cutting across the grass to get there on time . . . standing up when the “master” entered the classroom . . . playing hard on the soccer field . . . acting obsequious (if you were an underclassman) toward seniors . . . being condescending toward underclassmen (if you were a senior not liked by any underclassman) . . . projecting machismo by pretending to be nonchalant about the absolutely stunning scenery wherever you looked . . . and learning the art of conversation (and the proper way to present a tea or coffee cup for refill) at “evening coffee” in the lounge, to which the headmaster would invite a different group of students each evening following dinner, by rising during dessert, tapping his water glass, making some announcements and ending with something like, “On behalf of Mrs. Birmingham and the distinguished Sterling faculty and their wives, I now want to invite to this evening’s coffee, all members of the junior varsity soccer team, all Sterling scholars from west of the Mississippi, and all students of Monsieur Moutard [the French teacher who was actually from France, who wore the same French-made suit every day, and whose favorite filler phrase was, “Bon, allons . . . “], and, as usual, the entire senior class.”). It didn’t take me long to adjust to my new environs, and within a few weeks, I was thriving on all fronts. My recovery from the “incomplete” in geography back at Anoka Junior High was now complete.
I communicated with the rest of the family mostly by letter-writing, but every week or ten days, I received a call from my parents. At the end of the corridor upstairs in my dorm, Adams Hall, there was a pay phone where you could make or receive a call. With respect to incoming calls, parents knew that the best time to call was during the only unstructured hour of the day, which fell between the end of evening study hall at 9:30 and lights out, at 10:30. The only problem was, you were pretty much at the whim and mercy of the unlucky kids who lived right next to the pay phone. Sometimes they were carrying on in someone else’s room. Often, they just didn’t want to answer. Other times, they’d answer, drop the receiver and let it twist on its cable while they yelled out, “Parmley!” or “Fullerton! . . . Telephone!” and maybe “Parmley” or “Fullerton” heard his name and answered in time or maybe he didn’t. It was all pretty hit or miss, and in any event, whether you were calling out or taking a call, it was hard to hear over all the stereos playing the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Blood, Sweat and Tears or the dorm monitors yelling at the kids who thought the hallway was a good place to practice penalty shots on a soccer goal.
One evening in early October, soon after returning to my room after study hall, I heard James (never “Jim”) Miles bellow down the hall, “N-I-L-S-S-O-N!!!! T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N-E!!!!!!” I went upstairs, and raised the dangling, twisting receiver to my ear.
“Hello?” I said.
“Are we getting any smarter up there at Sterling School than we were back in Minnesota?” For a tenth of a second, I wondered exactly who “we” were, but in the next fraction of time, I remembered that that was how Uncle Bruce talked. “I” and “you” often came out as “we.”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, recovering from the surprise that it was Uncle Bruce not Mother and Dad.
“Are your teachers grading your homework correctly,” he said in a loud voice, “or do you have to hand it back to them so they can correct their mistakes?” He followed his opening salvo with a hearty “heh, heh,” which threatened to get away from him.
I pretended to be humored by it and said, “No, for the most part, they’re doing pretty well and giving me good grades.”
“Your Mother tells me that parents’ weekend is coming up the weekend after next,” he said. “I thought I’d come up, since I’ll be going up to Vermont anyway for a board meeting at Hogback.”
His call, let alone his self-invitation had caught me off guard, and the hallway noise was getting louder, so partly out of surprise and partly out of an instinctive reaction to the blaring stereos and kids shouting, I said, “What?”
“I said, your Mother told me that parents are going up there to Sterling the weekend after next. Is there anything you want me to bring you?”
I said I would think about it and send him a list. He said he would arrive around lunchtime on Saturday of parents’ weekend. I asked about Gaga and Grandpa, and he said they were doing fine, and then I said I had to go, that I had to get ready for lights out.
After lights out, as I lay in the upper bunk of the room that I shared with Jean-Marie DesRoches, a French-speaking kid from Montreal[1], I wondered what other kids would think of Uncle Bruce and how I could explain that he was my uncle, not my dad. I didn’t worry about Jean-Marie. With his heavy accent, odd-looking clothes, and different way of doing things, surely he wouldn’t be put off by anything that was different about Uncle Bruce. But the other kids were another story. For the most part, they were very “preppy” (before the term even came into vogue), and I worried how Uncle Bruce’s being just a little different would reflect on me.
I made a mental list of the pros and cons of his upcoming visit. On the positive side, he was rich and from the Northeast—which was the common combination of so many kids at the school. On the negative side, he had a tendency, I noticed during my ski trip with him the previous year, to say and do things that were a little quirky, like saying “me-oh-my” under his breath, and whistling constantly, the same tunes, over and over. On the positive side, darned near everyone at the school was a serious skier, so the fact that Uncle Bruce was part owner and on the board of directors of a ski area—in Vermont—ought to count for a lot. On the negative side, the ski area was small and had a funny name with a pig for a mascot. On the positive side, he drove a 1967 Mustang, but on the negative side, the inside of the car was a mess. On the positive side, he was very smart. On the negative side, he was not afraid to speak his unconventional mind. On the positive side, he had a good sense of humor, but on the negative side, his sense of humor was just a little . . . well, that was just the problem—he had a sense of humor that he wasn’t afraid to demonstrate by making an oddball comment to a perfect stranger, as, for example, I’d seen him do at a restaurant during our ski trip, when the waiter served him the wrong order of soup and Uncle Bruce said, very directly, forcefully and with a laugh that could easily annoy people two tables away, “Waiter, I want you to make sure that the person who is enjoying my chicken noodle soup knows to give you an extra tip.” But he was my uncle, our uncle. He was Uncle Bruce, who was always so good to us, and thanks to him—not anyone else in my family—I fit in at Sterling, in large part because I could ski. Besides, there would be no polite way to say he wasn’t welcome at parents’ day.
The next day at evening study hall, I finished up my homework and then pulled out my Sterling School stationary to write my nightly letter. Study hall was compulsory for all freshmen and sophomores, and the 50 of us sat at long rows of tables under the watchful eye of a “master,” who alternated between pacing up and down the center aisle and around the sides of the room, hands clasped behind his back, and sitting at a desk at the front of the room, peering over the top of a book every once in awhile to make sure that his charges, still attired in their ties and Sterling blazers, were at least appearing to be studious. It had become my routine to complete my homework as diligently and expeditiously as possible so as to free up time to do what I liked to do most—write letters. Rarely did a study hall session end without my having jotted down quite a few lines to a distant correspondent, usually Mother and Dad, one of my sisters, Grandpa Nilsson (Ga had died by this time), Gaga and Grandpa, or Uncle Bruce. They all were very good about writing back. (Cont.)
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] A while after I’d landed at Sterling, Mr. Bryant informed me that Jean-Marie had been assigned to my room because of my “writing skills,” as had been exhibited, apparently, in my essay response to the admissions question, “Why do you want to attend Sterling School?”
