He aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn. Because if He’d a aimed for man to be always a-moving and going somewheres else, wouldn’t He a put him longways on his belly, like a snake? It stands to reason He would.
– William Faulkner’s Anse Bundren
I can’t stop moving across this campus. Every few hours or so I gotta find a new place to study. I walk all over campus. Sometimes for no good reason. Sometimes I just wanna walk around and see new people and smell the campus and trip over all the cracks and uneven cement. And I want to get hit by a bike, sometimes. You always see something new. It might just be a habit I developed on my first day of classes at A&M. I got lost looking for Heldenfelds Hall. I walked around Evans Library about four times looking for the place. Finally, I asked a cadet and he pointed at the building right behind me.
I’m not like this in Dallas. There’s no place like A&M in Dallas. I don’t walk much over there. So every time a new semester would start over here, for the first couple days my shins and feet get sore. ‘Cause I gotta get used to walkin’ a lot again. Then I get the rhythm. My feet lead the way. I just have to listen’ to ’em. It’s fun. I’m sorta glad its a big campus. It’s fun that way — walkin’ and listenin’ to music.
The other day I was walking by Evans Library and saw this lonely little shoe next to to where they were doing some construction. I thought about the shoes. Some girl must have dropped it, right? Then I figured, well maybe a fella went out on a date with some girl. But she was graduating and moving far away. So he got drunk and took her shoe from her and ran off. Like a reverse-Cinderella. Then he realized he couldn’t do nothing with a single shoe, so he dropped it and went on home.
a young writer from the lone star state 