The real place

Off in one of those alternate universes, there is this well house on the Indiana University campus. If it had a real well, it was long sealed off by 1965. It had stone benches inside. It was a good place to go neck with your girl friend if there was nowhere else to go. If you kissed a girl here you were going to marry her, so the tale goes. Me and my buddy, my fellow newspaper boy, would turn in our money on Saturday morning from our routes and take our profits and buy every comic book we could find and junk food and come up here to sprawl on the grass and read the comic books.

This statue is nearby now, I think. I've never seen it in person. But the real guy used sit near the well house and admire the view. He was Chancellor or President or whatever the title was. He had made a point of getting the grounds people on the campus to plant and maintain every species of tree and bush that could grow in the Indiana climate. He would sit out for a while every morning just admiring the view. Anyone could go and talk to him. I talked to him several times when I was a kid.

It looks like Hoagy in frozen in time back there too. Of the world travelers that attend conventions and trade shows, they say that flying into Indianapolis is like flying into 1950. I believe it. There's a lot of different versions of Bloomington and Indiana. For me it will be 1969-1970 and skinny-dipping in the quarries and hippie music and hippie smells