legend has it that he was a stout boy that oliver r. smoot of lambda chi stretching all 5 foot 7 inches of his oliver arms, oliver legs, oliver body above the enticing midnight water across the cold harvard bridge pridefully picked up by his brothers positioned where his head left off and his toes began ticking off the bridge as a measurement stick each line streaky and chalky and a smoot. google maps has it that i’m 1,384,776 smoots from dorm to home oliver would only have to lie down a couple hundred times hundred thousand times across neighborhood taco joints sprinting through know-every-cement-crack back-alleys by please-let-me-stay-the-night friends’ houses over no harvard bridge or water but landlocked panhandle and manmade lake he’d have to lie under, on, over that lake where the radio waves of “suburbia” and “idle town” and some senior year cry still echo slowly rippling as we blink out of red eyes and sore minds. rumor has it that it’s only 1,384,776 smoots of spilled slushies, rushed drive-thrus last-minute turn signals mowing over highway lines that oliver would have to endure interstate miles that all 5 foot 7 inches of my arms, my legs, my body the same height as oliver would have to retrace tick-mark up, recompute calculate kundera’s mathematical paradox in nostalgia: “that it is the most powerful in early youth when the volume of the life gone by is quite small.” how, i wonder, can the distance between dorm and home stretch farther than a million olivers but also be one short me one smoot.
