Inktober 24: #Shallow
In which Dan Hipp (possibly) makes a wrong turn
When my old friend Dan Hipp was a senior at the University of Illinois (or maybe it was Indiana? Purdue? Possibly Iowa…One of those schools in the I-states), he had some friends who were going to Villanova for the weekend, so he jumped in the car to go with them. He had friends in Philadelphia, and he was glad in any case for the chance to get out of Illinois or Indiana, or possibly Iowa for a few days.
As soon as the car got on the interstate, Dan fell asleep, and he didn’t wake up until they reached their destination. “Are we in Philly yet?” he asked, groggily.
“Philly?” said the driver. “What Philly? We’re in Nashville.”
“Villanova is in Philadelphia,” said Dan.
“True enough,” said the driver. “But Vanderbilt is in Nashville.”
Dan had misheard his friends when they said they were going to Vanderbilt. He thought they said “Villanova.” He had no interest in Vanderbilt or Nashville either one, but since he was here anyway he had a look around. He liked what he saw, so he applied for graduate school, got accepted, and completed his PhD at Vanderbilt. He also met his wife Julie there.
It’s funny how life works, isn’t it?
Anyway, the other day Dan mentioned that he was taking one of his high-school sons to tour Villanova.
I wrote back, “I hope you aren’t putting too much pressure on him to finish what you started. Let Villanova go, man.”
Dan seemed perplexed. “I got my Masters at Villanova, before I came to Vanderbilt,” he said.
I said that couldn’t be right, since there was the whole thing about his accidentally catching a ride from Illinois, Indiana, or Iowa to Vanderbilt when he thought he was going to Villanova.
Dan said he had no idea what I was talking about. Which seems strange, since I’ve been telling that story—to great gales of laughter, I might add—for twenty-five or thirty years now. Dan denies the whole thing. He has his reasons, I suppose, be they deep or #shallow.
On the other hand, I guess it is possible that it was I, and not Dan, who heard wrong. When you think about it, “I got my Masters at Villanova then went to Vanderbilt” sounds a lot like “I got in a car I thought was headed to Philadelphia but ended up in Nashville, and it changed the course of my life.”