Iowa State, My Dinner with Paul

I watched something tonight that had a reference to Hitchcock and ‘The Birds’. It got me thinking about my junior year of college.

Living in Westgate, we had a bit of a walk outside to get to dinner over in Friley Hall. We had to walk past Clyde Williams Field and State Gym, through Helser, and then into Friley (where you could eat in Windows or Dungeon).

There was one night in the Fall of ’87 I went to eat with my friend Paul. It was a nice night in terms of temperature, but winter was coming–the leaves were all off the trees. That’s important but as me and Paul walked to dinner, we weren’t thinking about that. That’s important, too.

So we go past State and Clyde Williams and we reach Helser. We go through the west-east double-doors and Paul made a comment about loving fall, probably a comment on the Vikings, too. He added a comment about it being windy because you could hear the rustling of the leaves.

Remember the earlier comment…the leaves had fallen. I realized this and made a comment “Those aren’t leaves.” They weren’t. The trees to Helser Hall’s east were filled with crows and in the almost-dark made it look as if the trees still had all their leaves.

Paul’s response to my comment??? —>”And those aren’t rain drops.”

We took off at a sprint. Neither of us got hit by the sudden downpour of bird poo falling from all the trees. We didn’t do late dinners walking that route for a while after that.

I wonder if Paul remembers that now, 34 years later???

I believe in the years after we lived in Westgate, Iowa State’s Facilities people took some preventative action to keep the crows from ‘murdering’ people. Helser’s been renovated so this isn’t the walk-path we took, but you get the idea from this about the trees and thebirds….