For students in their final year of study, GOEs await upon return from Christmas break. The night before I left for that break, I filled a carry-on bag with books, intent on studying during the time off. I determinedly dragged it downstairs to the door in preparation for my departure the following morning at which time I left it sitting in the entryway in the rush to get into the taxi. It awaited me there upon my return. It would have broken the springs on the taxi driving me to the airport. No one in her right mind would have tried to move it.
I didn't discover that I had left it behind until a day or two after I arrived home. I was a bride of about two weeks the previous August when I departed Kansas City for my final year at Yale Divinity School, leaving my new husband behind. My first two days at home did not allow time for much studying. But on day three of vacation, I went looking for the carry on bag and realized that it was in New Haven. After a couple of hours of intermittent fretting I came to appreciate having the excuse not to study.
Our 1994 GOEs started on Monday morning, the New Year holiday having fallen on the previous Saturday. I was one of four students living in the house where Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is located. It's an Episcopal Church Seminary that operates in conjunction with Yale's interdenominational seminary. The house is a three-story Victorian mansion about two blocks from the main Div School campus. Four of us lived on the third floor in what had been the servants' rooms - think Downton Abbey but without the locked door between the men and the maids. Everyone taking the exam was required to show up at the house each morning to collect that day's questions. On that first Monday we were sternly admonished to return the finished product by 5:00 p.m. on pain of dreadful but unspecified sanctions. At that point we were sent forth to our respective homes, dorm rooms and work spaces to complete that day's set of questions. We happy few who lived in the house had but to wander down a couple of flights of stairs to pick up the questions and climb back up to the third floor to meet our destiny.
That was an advantage during the legendary winter of 1993-94. In the northeast the snow lay on the ground from the first week of December through the end of March. A new batch of it fell at least once a week. On January 4 it was knee high and the temperature was in single digits. Being able to pick up and deliver test questions with a round trip of four flights of stairs was much better than clearing off the car and driving to and from home or walking down the hill from the residence halls on campus.
The test covered four days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday with Wednesday off. It was snowing lightly when we woke on Friday and snow continued to fall all day long. Outside my window I heard rasp of the snowplow every couple of hours and imagined the entryway of our house caked with the red sand that New Haven public works sprinkled over its icy streets. At one minute 'til 5:00 I printed my answers and walked downstairs feeling glad it was over. Classmates hung around the foyer after they had turned in their papers, comparing answers and making plans for the weekend. We noticed that one guy was missing.
In 1994 cell phones were called car phones and few people had them. A handful of people used email regularly, but they didn't carry it around with them. We who lived in the house had our own land lines in our rooms and the staff had phones in their offices, but they were still on winter break. The house itself really didn't have a phone. There was no way for someone who was late delivering a paper to call in and explain why. Half an hour past the deadline, our missing classmate came racing into the house, gasping for air, with his test papers in his hand. He had parked his car on the street in front of his building and the snowplow had tossed up a berm of snow pinning it into the curb. Snow had fallen all day and after half a dozen passes, there was a three-foot-high wall of snow between him and the test proctor. He didn't realize what had happened until ten minutes before five when he stepped out the door. He had run all the way from home. The dreadful but unspecified sanctions were not invoked. Someone drove him back to his place.
That evening the four of us who lived in the house happened all to be sitting in the common area between our respective rooms. The test was over; what was done was done. Our last semester would begin the following Monday. We started wondering out loud where we would all be a year from that night. Now, nearly 19 years later, I think we're all somewhere that makes us happy and we're doing work we believe is worth doing. Good luck and blessings, class of 2013.
Thanks for this reminiscent story. I remember that winter! I was a student down the hill, at Yale College.
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