The “old days” are more alive than ever – by which I mean my old days, when I was a kid. My life pushed forward on its own, more or less. This is called growing up. I wasn’t paying much attention until, at a certain point, a.k.a., adolescence, I started noticing the world I was a part of in ways beyond what I was taught. The world itself was changing and nobody, including my teachers, really understood it.

Existence wasn’t a bunch of bricks-and-mortar certainties. It was a vast unknown. Knowing this was alarming; it was also the meaning of freedom.

Today, as I move through the dark, stumbling uncertainty known as old age (I’m 78), I find myself looking backwards a lot, mulling over how I got here, often in amazement. For some reason it seems to matter. Can I learn from myself?

Occasionally I find myself writing about the process, celebrating those moments of self-awareness – little nuggets of gold – that played major roles in my becoming. The memory consuming my attention today goes beyond simply self-awareness and the evolving nature of what I believe. At a certain point in my late adolescence, with adulthood looming, I got sent up to my room – not by Mom or Dad, but by a guy I remember by the name Big Nick – and the world changed. I became a conscious participant in it for the first time in a serious way, beyond just my emotions and self-concern.

I was a freshman in college – a lonely boy, bashful and clueless (oh God, would I ever have a girlfriend?). The college I wound up attending was Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, far enough from the Detroit area, where I grew up, to make me feel like I was on my own. I had chosen the school almost randomly. Most of my high school classmates were going to the University of Michigan. I didn’t want to follow the smarty herd. Western had come to my attention because its basketball team had done well that year. Good enough for me. I just wanted to get away.

Turns out I couldn’t have made a better choice – for multiple reasons, both good and bad. Its faults were as much of a gift to me as its remarkable virtues. One of its faults was its plethora of socially conservative student rules, attempting to lock young people into the proper behavior of a bygone era. One rule I remember, for instance, was this: Girls had to wear skirts or dresses to class – unless the temperature was zero degrees or colder! Then they could wear slacks.

I also remember the sign that my dormitory director had posted on his office door. It said: “Look your best – we’re coed.” Huh? This was the mid-‘60s. Colleges across the country were exploding with free-speech movements and post-beatnik-era social and political change. Western seemed unaware of this and continued to blather paternalistic propriety at is students.

One Saturday afternoon, in my second semester as a freshman, I went down to dinner in the dorm cafeteria. It was early spring; the weather was starting to warm up. I was wearing shorts and a pair of sandals. This was against the rules. Remember: Look your best, we’re coed! The girls ate in the same cafeteria as the boys did.

I can’t remember if I was being deliberately defiant – I actually don’t think so. Dress-code rules were hardly at the forefront of my attention. I just went down to the cafeteria wearing what I was wearing. But there was Big Nick, standing at the door. He stopped me as soon as I entered, informed me that I was dressed inappropriately, and sent me back up to my room.

Here’s where the “other” Western enters my life as fully as possible and opens the door to my future. One of the classes I was taking that semester was called Freshman Writing (or something like that). It was a required course, unless you tested out of needing to take it, which – praise the Lord – I had failed to do. My teacher was a man named Karl Sandelin, an enthusiastic and truly caring guy who had one goal: to help us find our voices as writers.

When I got back to my room I was bristling with rage and incredulity. Something had been ignited in me – something far bigger than a need for dinner. All these rules are so dumb! I needed to . . . what? Opening my window and screaming wouldn’t calm me down. Instead, I sat at my typewriter and started writing. Writing needs a focus. My focus was Karl Sandelin. He was open to anything – anything! – his students wrote and I knew he would read it with focus and serious interest. I spent all evening typing away at an essay about the rules, taking a deep look at why they were pointless, reflecting nothing more than the values of an outmoded, pseudo-propriety. These rules didn’t represent the thoughtful, evolving Western I knew I was attending.

I called the essay “Look Your Best – We’re Coed.”

Yeah, cool. Karl definitely had a positive response, and we remained friends throughout my time at Western. He wasn’t the only professor who had a profound effect on my life there, but he was the first.

But writing it was just the beginning – of something well beyond what I could imagine. I went on with my life: finished the semester, worked at Ford Motor Co. that summer, then started my sophomore year. I hadn’t forgotten about the essay; I made a few revisions. Eventually I took a leap. I submitted it to a school publication called The Western Review – a monthly literary journal. What the heck. They might be interested.

A few days later . . . it was sometime mid-afternoon. I was back in my dorm, decided to take a shower. Then I returned to my room. I walked in naked. There was someone talking to my roommate. His name was Barry – he was the editor of the Western Review! He wanted to meet me. He told me that “Look Your Best – We’re Coed” would be running in the next issue, which would be out in a few days. Perhaps by then I had wrapped a towel around myself, but I’m not sure.

And it ran. And there was a seismic shift. The students went nuts; a bunch of them were sitting in my dorm room when I got back from my classes the day it ran. People were calling for change – and the rules started changing. Western entered the ’60s. And I decided, hmmm . . . maybe I’ll be a writer when I grow up.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments, is available here: https://linktr.ee/bobkoehler

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