Inside Tour

The students were mostly gone, summer session done. The grass and the trees were catching their breath from the tramplings they'd grown used to. The sky was blue, but the air was cool, a welcome break for four travellers having just escaped the blistering heat of Texas.

The four of them -- a man, a woman, and two boys -- parked their car north of Green and walked along the bike lanes to the central campus several blocks to the south. It was full sun, but they marvelled at the temperature.

They wandered thru Altgeld Hall with its cool mosaic floors, low ceilings, hidden stairways, and empty basement classrooms with casement windows peering out onto the sunny summer day. They climbed the stacks of the Mathematics Library, where the man showed them the very spot where he discovered Lanczos and marvelled that he could understand it. And the man pulled old tomes from the shelves and showed them to the boys.

Look! This one's in German.

Look! This one's in Italian.

Look! This one's in Dutch.

Sometimes they looked. Sometimes he turned to find them gone, exploring the dark corners and cubicles themselves.

They walked across the greening quad, and the man talked about playing frisbee among the teeming hoards of students sitting on the grass. He told them about Chemistry here and English there. And they went to see the Morrow Plots and the underground undergrad library and the real library next door, where the card catalogs still stand looking lonely beside the rows of computer screens.

Walking again on the quad, they passed a crowd of kids on a tour led by a woman walking backwards talking to them, talking to the children who didn't seem to be listening at all. There were a lot of them: a lot for the poor guy at the end to try to keep corralled, a lot to not be listening.

And as the man and the woman and the two boys passed those kids, one of the two boys seemed to notice that those kids weren't listening.

Well, he announced after the crowd has passed, they don't have their dad to give them an inside tour.

The dad smiled.

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University of Illinois, Urbana IL

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