The campus was big like a city, and every day I would walk it, get lost in it. I wandered into buildings, crept into empty classrooms, peeked into offices. Old wooden tables and desks, giant windows, wood paneling. The tones of the older buildings were darker, richer, beautiful. The newer buildings were colder, more austere, like clinics or hospitals, but even they were surrounded by giant lawns and landscaped walkways leading to hidden garden patios.

There were dorms scattered about, each with its own amenities--swimming pools, basketball courts, convenience stores, lounges and study rooms. There was a dorm for married couples and families that appeared to be a village with playgrounds and washers and dryers and a big general store. I'd never seen anything like this. The campus went on forever, changing with each turn, each hill.

There was a new building for the biological sciences that housed The State Museum. It contained a replica of a limestone cave, a fantastic thing with dim red lights that led you through the stalactites and stalagmites and dripping pools of water where blind fish had adapted to the dark along with other nightmarish flora and fauna. It was rare that anyone was there.

By the agriculture building on the outskirts of the campus were farms where crop production was studied. They rented garden spots to students near Lake Alice which was large and full of alligators. Nearby were the medicinal gardens, lovely to wander, where the School of Medicine grew the plants from which old medicines were made. The Veterinary School had ranches where they raised hogs and sheep and cows and horses on big, rolling hill ranches.

Every college of the had a library, it seemed. There were two multi-storied main library buildings connected by a walkway. There was an Education Library and a Biological Sciences Library, an Engineering Library and an Architecture and Fine Arts Library. There was a separate Performing Arts Library and a Forestry Library. And there were others. I would enter them all with trepidation, feeling that someone would call me out, ask me what I was doing there. I virtually tiptoed through the isles and up the stairs poking my head everywhere I could finding great places, wonderful places with old windows and tables where nobody seemed to come, dark places and light places, quiet, secret places.

Often, I would be overcome and have to sit down or go outside. How could I take it all in? There was too much. Far too much.

My professors were not like any I'd had before, serious men and women who appeared as royalty, speaking with authority, surrounded by sycophantic students wishing for notice. Everyone was competitive.

I wanted to be part of this.