In summer 1995, we were clerks together at a small dry cleaning shop in Parkville, Mo. Sherry’s husband was a full-time maintenance worker at the college and she’d taken the job to make some extra pay for their family. She and her husband had a two-year old girl, and while she never said so, I heard a couple heated conversations between them both that told me their relationship was close to an end. I guessed she was pocketing some money away so that she could leave him, the only issue being the job paid poorly and it’d be another half a year before she was ready to pack her things and go. I deduced all this on my own, but she told me later in the summer, after we’d gotten to know each other.

Dry cleaning shops in the summer are possibly the hottest place son earth, maybe the worst job for the season aside from asphalt paving. By the time we took over the counter in mid-afternoon, most of the clothes had been pressed, bagged, and the building was filled with heat. The press operators would switch out with us, but all we did was tag any in-coming laundry and charge for pick ups. We never cleaned a thing, which made the afternoon from 2-5, just before the rush hour lines formed and brought more body heat inside, made for some quiet time. I filled mine that summer with Kurt Vonnegut. I read every book of his I hadn’t read, with the exception of one or two, in that hot cleaning shop with the poor ventilation and a desk radio tuned to 101 The Fox. Sherry’s station.

Sherry was older than me about six years. And she struck me as a teenage girl who wanted to grow up and was pretending at 18 to be 28, only now she was 28 and her emotional development had frozen back at 18. I saw her standing out back behind the high school smoking at 7:15 and getting to class late, stepping cig butts into the pavement in that poor, poor florescent lighting that high schools were lit with then. She was content for a week or so to listen to the radio. She was a Paul Rodgers fan. She told me Alright Now was the sexiest song she’d ever heard. I had never heard it that way. But classic rock is a language I spoke and I think she was surprised a college boy could relate.

When we started together, I was reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the first book I read that summer. My girlfriend was reading it. I picked up a copy because she told me it was her favorite book and it would become mine. Sherry was content to let me read at first. We didn’t know each other and I think she probably didn’t want to interrupt me. After a few days, she asked what I was pouring over, a simple, “What d’ya reading?” I told her about the story and that afternoon she walked across the parking lot to the library and came back with a copy.

She started reading that day. We talked about the characters on our shifts as though they were soap opera characters, and the story reads that way. Sherry caught up to me – she was reading at home – and she passed me, then finished before me. She knew how the story turned out and held it over my head a little until I’d finished. She teased me for reading so slowly, but I was studying the words. I was trying to read it from a writing standpoint and if you’ve ever read East of Eden, you know how much there is to take in.

I finally finished the book. We shared ideas about the characters and she remembered more about the story in her quick read than I’d comprehended in methodically reading line after line, again and again. A few days later, she had a shouting match with her husband in the parking. It was early in the morning and he had parked the car across several parking spaces out front. I watched through the slatted window and when the talk started to turn violent, I walked outside and saw the little girl strapped in the back seat. The car tore off, burned asphalt.

Sherry quit a few days later. I saw her husband on campus the next year working on landscaping or carrying tools and work materials. He had a plain face as blank as a new sheet of paper, and I can’t explain exactly why – it was just a feeling – but I could tell in his over-politeness that Sherry hadn’t left him. If she had, she’d come back. Maybe she would some day – maybe she has by now. I don’t know. But for a time, a week or more in 1995, Sherry was brighter about literature than a decent college student who wanted to learn.

One message in East of Eden, in part a re-telling of the bible’s Cain and Able story, is that people can overcome their background and choose free moral lives. They can. It just doesn’t happen all the time.

(Note: I changed Sherry’s name to protect her identity.)

This being the first full week of August, the streets will be alive again soon and these houses 50 feet or so off the walking paths will become the havens students imagine them to be, near campus but worlds apart all the same. The proprietors of these dwellings have long since been saved from the pressures of pop quizes, lab experiments gone awry and research papers.

Once, these houses were occupied by professors, scientists amd researchers affiliated with the university’s various departments, but in recent years have far exceeded the budgets of the professionals in those positions. Only the wealthy, most esteemed alumni live there now, and, as witnessed by the empty driveways, most still work thoughout the day in order to live so close to their alma mater.

There on the hill in Lawrence, one house’s front balconies opens up on the football stadium’s south end zone. On Saturday mornings, the owners can sit outside their front door and soak in the noises of the band marching down the hill – a tradition before the game – and listen to the crowd’s rumble as it comes over the cement grand stands and across the parking lot on the thin fall air. Touchdowns and field goals on the south end are in plain view of their barbecue grill and in more vivid perspective than on television.

During the summer, the stadium is merely a hollow nextdoor neighbor with a seemingly endless slab of cement and infinite yellow-lined parking spaces (nothing as lovely as the houses to the east, which are of a similar era and design.)

Most of these houses are missed by the college-aged kids who are often locked in discussion on the walks to and from class or who keep their eyes on the uneven sidewalks to avert discussion at all. I know because driving the streets yesterday with my wife, she pointed out a couple houses that avoided her noticce when she was a student here 10 years ago. In my opinion, they are as majestic as the University of Kansas’ most historic halls and athletic structures. They give the campus its real character, its hominess and its ties to a past when the town was comprised mostly of students, educators and a whole community of learning. The emphasis now is on obtaining a degree and leaving, abandoning the town for greater things than this small Kansas town. No one notices or thinks to stay in this Eden of charming houses outside the rush and pressure of education’s pursuit.