No Room In The Dorm Thomas M Parsons

17. No Room in the Dorm

It would have been quite convenient to meet an older version of myself just before going off to Grand Rapids. But the scenes envisioned in the imagination do not always have a presence in reality.

It was a beautiful September day, that day my new adventure was to begin. I had always liked September, with its crisp mornings and warm afternoons and bright skies. Driving that day was really enjoyable. My little Valiant perked along without missing a beat, and I was filled with anticipation for what was to come. I was also scared to death.

Of all the experiences of life, venturing out on one’s own for the first time is certainly one of the sweetest. It is a unique mixture of anticipation and fear, of hope and dread, of happiness and sadness, of promise and doom. One experiences such a wide range of opposing emotions all mixed in together. It is very difficult to describe, but anyone who has experienced it knows what a wonderful, bittersweet cacophony of sensations it is.

As a married man, and as a family man, I have set out on many different twists and turns life offers. But those were different. I had a wife with me. I had family with me. We faced the challenges together. Indeed, that is one of the blessings of being a married man. But as a twenty-four year old unmarried man who had never been away from home on his own before, setting out for Grand Rapids was such an experience as I have described here. My parents and family stayed behind in Lincoln Park. The sum total of people I knew in Grand Rapids was zero. Whatever good things awaited me, whatever evil things awaited me, were completely unknown to me. Failure? Or success? Loss? Or gain? Weakness? Or strength? What was out there? What would this new venture bring? I had no clue!

But on I went, covering the 150 miles in the usual time of one and a half hours. Soon I was seeing the green and white signs on I-96 that were indicating I was close to the final miles of my trip. My new adventure was just an exit or two ahead.

Soon I was taking the East Beltline exit, Exit 36, to be exact. And in just a matter of minutes I was turning from the East Beltline onto the campus of Grand Rapids Baptist College and Seminary where in a day or two I would begin classes at the seminary. My plan was to get the paperwork done, and get settled into the dorm as quickly as possible.

I drove into the parking lot of the administration building and went inside. The paperwork proceeded quickly, filling out forms that required me to write my name and address over and over again, and I gave a lady named Vi a check. Then I inquired about the dorm.

“Dorm?” she said. “You’re planning to stay in the dorm?”

Yes,” I said. “That’s my understanding.”

“Well,” she said, “the seminarians don’t usually stay in the dorms. They are for the college students.”

“Oh?” I said, starting to feel a little like perhaps I should have stayed in Lincoln Park. No. I didn’t want to do that. Then I would get drafted and be living in a barracks!

“Most seminarians are married, and they get their own housing.”

“I’m not married,” I said, “and I was led to believe I could stay in the dorms.”

“Not likely,” she said. “The dorms are filled with college students.”

“What do you suggest?” I asked. I had little money left after paying the tuition bill. Motels were expensive, especially for a whole school term.

To make a long story less lengthy, it turned out there were four of us who were homeless, unmarried seminarians. The Dean of Students gave us a copy of the Grand Rapids Press, and encouraged us to go apartment hunting. But it was already late in the day. He made a phone call, and directed us to an old, empty farm house on Leonard Street a couple of miles from the campus. A friend of the school owned the house, and he had some old beds there and said we could spend the night.

Tired, hungry, cold, disappointed and maybe a little lonely, Sid, Frank, Joe and I settled down for the night in the old house with no curtains on the windows and rusty beds that creaked when we looked at them. But we slept.

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The next day we went apartment hunting. There are some really dumpy apartments out there, and we saw the worst of them. Some were too expensive. Some were too cramped for four of us. Some were too dirty. Some were just plain too nasty for words.

The day wore on as we wore out. But as we were searching for a place to stay, I got to know these three fellow seminarians. They each were as different from me and from each other as is possible.

Sid was engaged to be married, and he was preparing for the chaplaincy in the military. He had graduated from a Christian college and was tall and thin with thick lips and a rather naive perspective on things. Frank was the son of a farmer in the east who made “$1,000 a month,” Frank told us, more than once. Like Sid, he was engaged. Unlike Sid, Frank was somewhat of a skeptic. He was headed for the pastorate, but he was not thrilled with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, with which his home church and the school were affiliated. Frank, too, had graduated from a Christian college, albeit a somewhat liberal one.

Then there was Joe.

It is difficult to describe Joe, even after all these years. I never quite understood how Joe got to where he was in life. Joe appeared to be, and perhaps was, slightly retarded. He lacked social graces. His clothes were always a bit rumpled and sometimes smelly. His conversations reflected a lack of understanding of the most basic rules of communication among civilized people. I do not mean to say he was crude or repulsive in his choice of words. He was just — well, he talked and acted like a twelve-year-old suddenly thrust into the company of intellectuals. Granted, it worked for Jesus. It didn’t work for Joe.

Sid and Frank and I wondered how he had graduated from a Christian college (he had) and gotten admitted to a graduate level seminary (he had). He talked about going into home missions. Maybe he could make it somewhere in the deep back country of the hills where people still raised younguns and made moonshine. He might have fit in with the mountain people to whom Christy ministered in the book of the same name. But not anywhere else.

This was our little band of homeless future servants of the Lord. We made the rounds that day, my second day away from home, the second day of my great adventure. And we turned down or were turned down for a variety of living arrangements.And then toward evening, again tired and discouraged, and facing another night in the old farm house with the moon shining through the uncurtained windows onto our rusty, creaky beds, we found a home.

It was the upstairs of a house that had been owned by an elderly couple, but which they had recently sold to the nursing home next door. They would live in the house until it was necessary for them to go into the nursing home, or until they died, whichever came first, then the nursing home would tear it down and put up a new wing for the home. The nursing home was owned by a denomination, not Baptist, but evangelical, so the couple who lived downstairs were believers. We had the entire upstairs — a living room, a kitchen and dining area, two bedrooms and a bathroom. The rent was relatively low, and dividing it four ways made the price too good to pass up. We signed on for one semester. We all hoped we could get into the school’s apartment building for the second semester, after the usual number of mid-year drop outs had vacated their spaces in the dorms and in the apartments.

It was okay, though. The living space was nice, and we had an elderly couple downstairs who treated us like grandchildren. Sometimes they fed us, sometimes they allowed us to use their phone. Always they were gracious and kind to us. The house on Fulton Street would be our home, for awhile, at least.

I don’t remember how we decided who would share a bedroom with whom, but I got Joe. There was a bunk bed in each of the bedrooms. Joe took the top. I took the bottom. We decided we would each purchase our own food, and respect each other’s food supplies. We each had a desk to do our much studying at. We were all set, it would seem, for our first year of seminary. We were all seasoned students, but little did we know what a challenging year it was going to be.