You Can’t Go Home Again

“Look homeward Angel, now and melt with ruth,

And O, ye Dolphins’ waft the hapless youth”

In the fall of 1971, I entered Yale University as one of 250 freshman women, the third class of women to be admitted to a college still dedicated to the concept of graduating “1000 male leaders” a year.  I was seventeen and thrilled to be away from Texas and my parents. I wasted no time actually going to most of my classes, especially the 8 am conversational French class and the entirely uninteresting inorganic chemistry class which required a one mile trek up Science Hill.  When the weather turned cold, so did my dedication to chemistry and so ended my first premedical career.  By the end of the first semester, I had partied my way to earning barely passing grades in the classes I did go to, and a big “F” in the detested inorganic chemistry, which I ameliorated by groveling before the teaching assistant and swearing never to take another science class.  He passed me.  My parents’ response to my less than stellar performance was a typical Southern “You better straighten up and fly right or we will bring you right back home to the University of Houston!” And so I did.

When I graduated four years later I finally did go back to Texas for medical school, but the allure of those “bright college years” had not quite worn off—the brilliant if unappreciated professors, the gothic architecture, the endless “intellectual” conversations over cigarettes and alcohol which went late into the night and early into the morning, the snowball fights, the chess games played out on a human scale between the North and South Courts of Berkeley College, the dogwood and cherry trees blooming in the spring.  During my fourth year of medical school, I had the opportunity to do “away” rotations, the medical student’s way of testing the waters to see if a particular program might be a good place for an internship and residency.  In November of 1978, I chose to go back to Yale for my medicine “subinternship.”  During the days I roamed the wards of Yale New Haven Hospital, dutifully following my resident’s every command.  At night I huddled under an electric blanket in a spare room in the poorly heated medical student dormitory, a far cry from the hissing radiators of the undergraduate colleges.  I figured out very quickly that being an undergraduate at Yale was very different from being an intern in an inner city hospital where there was no film society or cabaret club to entertain you in the evening.  By the time applications were due, I opted out.

My own daughter graduated from Yale in 2006, and like her mother before her, entered medical school after a period of intense resistance to her life’s calling.  And like I did, so long ago, she is applying for residencies in Internal Medicine.  I told her, “Don’t bother applying to Yale, it’s not the same as being in college.”  My husband, Yale ’70, told her the same thing.  Kids don’t listen to their parents, and besides, she still has friends there.  She flew from Houston to Hartford yesterday and made her way to New Haven for interviews today.  I spoke with her tonight, and despite dinner at Mory’s, a quick stop into Atticus Bookstore Café and a mild gray cloudy day, she told me that our instincts had been confirmed.

You can sing “Boola Boola” all you want, and call yourself an “Old Blue”, but you can only be seventeen and full of dreams once.  Thomas Wolfe was right—you can’t go home again.