Lids

Freshman pranks and college deans are usually a bad combination, but Max Cavnes had a way of making it all work out

by Greg Pike ’89

I had KP duty. I felt like Beetle Bailey washing the pots and pans, running the dishes through the dishwater, and helping Cookie prepare the food. It reminded me of making dinners with Ronnie in Wildman’s little apartment that summer, but now I wasn’t cooking for two, but 200. At least peeling potatoes wasn’t so bad. With two companies to feed three meals a day, there was not enough time to peel them by hand. I dumped them into a big drum, turned on the water, and switched it on. Leave them in too long and they came out looking like golf balls and Cookie would get very upset. He saw a new recruit every day and had no sense of humor.

We made bacon that morning. I pulled 500 strips and put them on 10 racks that went into the ovens like pizzas. There was enough grease left over to fill a two-gallon can. At mid-morning I went outside to smoke a cigarette and wash the heavy garbage cans. They must have weighed 50 pounds empty, and they were practically indestructible. I had to throw one off the loading dock onto a guardrail just to put a little dent in the thing. I looked up to see a quarter moon hanging in the blue sky.

I had pulled a stupid prank with garbage cans my freshman year at Centre. I remembered ringing the doorbell on a stately old house and listening to the sounds stirring within. With the chimes had come the barking, then some muffled voices, then the latch being fumbled with, and finally it opened. At this rate I would be lucky to be done by 10 o’clock. An older, well-dressed lady with white beauty-shop hair opened the door.

“Yes?” she said, as she smiled pleasantly.

“Hello,” I checked the paper in my hand, “Mrs. Bateman.” I looked into the liveliest blue eyes I had ever seen in one so old. “Did you happen to notice if your garbage can was missing its lid yesterday?”

“Why yes,” she said. “The Doctor mentioned it. He thought it strange but I told him not to worry, I was sure it would find its way back sooner or later.” Her eyes flashed but the smile never wavered.

“It has,” I said, and offered no explanation. I was wondering what she looked like 40 years ago and wondered at myself for thinking it. She smiled with that indulgent look that made you know that she made the best cookies and really knew how to listen.

Of course it was missing: I had taken it two nights before. It was early freshman year. I had probably been that drunk before but I really didn’t remember when. I remembered parties at two of the fraternity houses, maybe more than that, but I wasn’t really sure. I thought I had a good time, but something was out of place. It seemed like there was a formula for everything. Go here, do this, go there, say the right thing. Above all say the right thing because they were rush parties, and I was being judged by important people all the time. Say and think and look and feel . . . nonsense, it was time to do something. But what’s a freshman to do?

It was after 2 a.m., and the tiny little town was asleep. I was walking down a wide tree-lined avenue with fine old houses set well back from the street. In front of every house, lined neatly along the curb like silent sentinels patiently waiting for their wake-up call, was an endless row of garbage cans. The street was straight, the lights were lit, and those gray soldiers were lined up at attention. On the first trip, I was giggling all the way back to the dorm. I could only carry about 20 lids at a time.

By the time it was starting to get light I was finally ready for sleep. The last load had been an eight-block round trip. I woke up around lunchtime and didn’t think much about it. That afternoon a few friends came by, and I showed them the collection. I got a few appreciative nods about its size but no big stir was caused. People collected all kinds of things. Driveway reflectors, house numbers, advertising banners from car lots, beer cans, pop-tops. Pop top chains were all the rage. The real ones, of course, were from beer cans that had been actually drunk by the owner. But for the collector no trash can was out of bounds, and I had seen chains over a hundred yards long. It was later that evening when the first news of trouble came.

Cavnes had put out word that he’d gotten some phone calls from a few people in town. It seemed they’d noticed their trash can lids were missing. The next morning the dean began wandering the halls, making it known that the coming evening would probably be a good one to take the damn things back so he wouldn’t have to listen to any more phone calls. I called him into my room and showed him what had miraculously appeared in my closet. The dean looked at me with a sad shake of his head.

“This must have taken hours,” he said. He went on to say something about more energy than sense and that he expected to hear no more from the good townspeople. Then he laughed.

“What are you planning to study?” he asked.

“Biology, I guess. Maybe biochemistry,” I answered.

“Pre-med?”

“I guess so. That’s the plan.”

Ever since I was little that had always been the plan. I had been told I was the smart one and it just seemed to follow that I would grow up and want to be a doctor. I had been picked out of my fifth-grade class for special testing. I was sent to another school to take advanced classes after that. Dr. Cavnes sat down on my bed.

“Is that what you want to do?”

It was my turn to laugh. This guy is pretty sharp.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it would really be like. How can anybody know what he wants to do if he can’t see what it’s like?”

“Well,” he said in a long drawn-out way, “nobody can see the future. I think people should figure out what they’re good at and what they like to do.”

He looked at the garbage can lids and then looked back at me. We both laughed at the same time.

“How did you pick Centre?” he asked.

“It wasn’t my first choice. I thought because of the advanced classes I took I could go anywhere. I applied to Yale and Duke and some others. I almost got in at Duke, at least they said I was on the waiting list, but they took someone else in my high school that beat me on the National Merit test by one point. I didn’t want to go to UK with a hundred in a class, so here I am.”

“This is a good school, you could have done worse.”

“I know, it’s just that I had never heard of it before.”

The dean then told a string of funny stories about some of the more famous and infamous people who had gone to Centre over the years. As he finally got up to leave, I assured him that the lids would find their ways home. At the doorway he stopped and turned.

“The education is good, but there are only two things that are really important to have.” He paused. “That’s good health and good friends.”

He smiled and left.

I had not thought much about my health before, but I felt as if I had just made a good friend.

After graduating from Centre, Greg Pike ’71 joined the Army and trained as a sentry dog handler before going to Vietnam. “Lids” is a chapter from Almost Home, an unpublished memoir that he describes as “two parallel stories,” one of “a student at a small southern college in the late sixties who dreams of going of medical school” and the other of “the graduate who finds himself a soldier in Vietnam.” He now has a building and remodeling company in Lawrenceburg, Ky., where he lives with his wife, Sharon, and their three children.

Centrepiece
Centre College
600 West Walnut St.
Danville, KY 40422

Phone: (859) 238-5717
Fax: (859) 238-5723
E-mail: alumnews@centre.edu
or johnsond@centre.edu