The Problem With College - Part 2

One November at Shippensburg University I was struck with the brilliant idea of getting the "Soccer House" a Christmas tree.

The only problem was that my roomates and I really didn't have money for a tree. We really didn't have money at all.

College for most kids means poverty. A real luxury would be having an extra dollar available to get a chili dog at Sheetz. You pay tuition. You pay for books, which are outrageously expensive. And you pay for a place to live. Everything else is the result of scraping a couple of nickels together.

So I walked around for a few days with the idea of getting a Christmas tree for our house. How nice it would be to fill the house with the smell of pine, and the atmosphere of the holiday season! Liven up our dumpy house a little bit.

Someone in the house did have a bow saw. And Shippensburg is surrounded by mountains and forests. But no one had a van or a truck. We didn't have rope to tie a tree to the top of a car.

I was beginning to just forget about the idea. Then one day I was walking across campus between classes and there it was - the perfect Christmas tree. It was the right height, the right shape, it was the perfect Christmas tree growing right in the middle of campus a stone's throw away from the library.

I enlisted two accomplises and we planned our mission. We set out to quickly skirt onto the campus, saw down the tree, and be gone as fast as we came - no messing around.

The campus was only one block away from our house. There was a path that led over railroad tracks right onto campus.

It was around midnight and the campus was completely empty. We did a kind of fast walk until we got to the tree. It was perfect, sitting all by itself with nothing else around.

We quickly sawed through the trunk and all three of us picked it up immediately and started jogging away with it.

Suddenly we saw headlights. Oh no, a car was coming. Now I've played enough "kick-the-can" growing up to know how to work the shadows and stay out of sight at night. I directed us through the darkest areas, never taking my eyes of the car heading in our general direction, intersecting the path we had to go.

It wasn't just a car. It was campus security. The jig was up. We had to do something. We could drop the tree and all flee in different directions. Maybe only one of us would be caught. Then suddenly it came to me.

Luckily I've seen a lot of cartoons in my day. I ordered my accomplises to prop the tree upright, just like it was still in the ground, and we all hid behind it.

The campus security officer drove right by us, never noticing that the tree had somehow moved about 100-yards. As soon as the coast was clear we picked it back up again and scrambled the rest of the way home, beaming with pride.

The rest of the house was proud of our accomplishment as we entered through the back door with our holiday joy. We set the tree up for the only Christmas season in the Soccer House that involved a tree, or any type of Christmas decorations at all.

Yes, apparently when you're 19-years-old your brain is only half developed. But being an idiot man-child leaves you with memories that last forever.