Jen and I lived in the same dorm – she on the 1st floor, me on the second. I had asked her earlier that evening to help deliver the campus weekly – to every dorm, fraternity, sorority, and so forth, in front of every student’s door. Alone, the task took nearly five hours, with help perhaps three.
Jen thought little of herself and only of others. She was my first choice for assistance on that evening – I knew she would accept. Beyond that, she had an easy conversation style, things never became too complex or complicated. She spoke little bad of anyone – quite the opposite of me – and might save me from blunder in steering the conversation so.
We crisscrossed campus in a borrowed car, trunk and back seat filled with bundles of papers, a hundred to a bundle, and bound by perpendicular plastic straps which could be cut, quite easily, with a sharp shear, but were otherwise unbreakable.
The night was warm and humid, and we ran at our task, divvying up the buildings in each cluster as we nudged the car along. Not once did she disagree, no matter how disagreeable the task, and it was, given the newsprint, humidity, and mindlessness of itself. Soon our forearms were stained black from the dark cover photo, a commencement crowd, shot so many years previous and ran without fail every Spring.
Others on campus partied and drink. Fraternity row erupted – a smorgasbord of bacchanalia whose steady roar, pierced only by screams and great crashes – a thousand bottles shattering – could be heard all over campus, even beyond the gym, so far away. We delivered the paper, a thankless, payless job. Jen had not even inquired as to compensation, as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, as if the deed, being done, would be its own reward, which, having read the paper-to-be-delivered, I knew it was not.
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