was not in Rudy’s “wheelhouse,” so to speak, to construct paper hats, play the “King of Ing,” and get everyone’s bookbags packed on time for the assembly, and it showed Monday morning. In his mind, the day started once they got to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, not before, not really. He was mostly concerned with stuff like everyone remembering their Widener I.D.s as he’d indicated in the e-mail. Would they keep their cell phones off as he’d specified? Would they stay in a group and have the decency to respect some of the ancient and classic texts they’d have access to? Rudy remembered this particular facility from his days at St. Joseph’s a decade and a half ago when he got his masters in literature, and on their field trip, he’d sat at a table paging carefully through an original folio version of Hamlet. It was an astounding, humbling honor, and he didn’t need some careless freshman spilling his energy drink on Gertrude’s counterfeit presentment of two brothers, thank you very much.
There was also Wolfie to think about, not only in terms of Rudy’s fear that he’d be an instant attraction to the kids no matter how discreet his disguise, but the fact that the boy’s excursion needed to go further than the first target location. When Rudy initially made the arrangements he had spoken to the head librarian at the Annenberg School for Communications Library, who had given permission for Rudy to take his kids to Rare Books and Manuscripts. It had been so long since he’d been there that Rudy mistakenly remembered the two as being in the same building, different floor. But with his casual Internet search the next day, Rudy found that Penn wasn’t like the smaller universities with a main library and another for law. There were more than eighteen library centers, all with materials of various disciplines, some up to two city blocks away from each other, and Wolfie was insistent that once they made camp at Rare Books, he be given the freedom to go on his own to Math, Physics, and Astronomy. The kid was highly perturbed, to say the least, since his reading of Rudy’s “biography” was only as good as what the man could recall, and now they had to romance some sort of generic gate-pass from the Annenberg librarian instead of merely retaining initial access through one entrance door. Moreover, Rudy could barely convince his students to go to a library within his own subject area, let alone some science think-tank where most of them couldn’t even begin to comprehend the abstracts.
And of course, during their bickering Sunday night over whether or not a librarian would actually answer a phone call or e-mail on the weekend versus a song and dance live and in person, Rudy had been on the Net trying to find a place for everyone to initially meet up for coffee. He picked the most obvious winner, a Starbucks, even though it was a few blocks off campus at 40th Street.
Bad mothering. He must have looked in the wrong column for the address, because what should have been a Starbucks turned out to be a still-closed Allegro Pizza, and Monday morning they were waiting for him there, half his class, mostly guys trying to up their grades, and two lacrosse players who happened to room together, Katie Dulaney and Bethany Durst. Many had their arms folded and were stamping the cold off their feet. Rudy came up and gave an awkward greeting, then fumbled through an introduction of his young cousin from Vermont, Drake Barnes. Wolfie gave a slight nod, and no one really paid attention to him. He had on a sweatshirt with the hood up and convenience store sunglasses, looking more the dock worker than some ravishing Prince of Darkness. He was in a sullen mood, carried over from yesterday, that pretty much echoed everyone else’s sentiments when they found they had to walk all the way to 36th and Walnut, through the back end of a shabby neighborhood that had nothing better to look at than rundown fraternity houses
There was also Wolfie to think about, not only in terms of Rudy’s fear that he’d be an instant attraction to the kids no matter how discreet his disguise, but the fact that the boy’s excursion needed to go further than the first target location. When Rudy initially made the arrangements he had spoken to the head librarian at the Annenberg School for Communications Library, who had given permission for Rudy to take his kids to Rare Books and Manuscripts. It had been so long since he’d been there that Rudy mistakenly remembered the two as being in the same building, different floor. But with his casual Internet search the next day, Rudy found that Penn wasn’t like the smaller universities with a main library and another for law. There were more than eighteen library centers, all with materials of various disciplines, some up to two city blocks away from each other, and Wolfie was insistent that once they made camp at Rare Books, he be given the freedom to go on his own to Math, Physics, and Astronomy. The kid was highly perturbed, to say the least, since his reading of Rudy’s “biography” was only as good as what the man could recall, and now they had to romance some sort of generic gate-pass from the Annenberg librarian instead of merely retaining initial access through one entrance door. Moreover, Rudy could barely convince his students to go to a library within his own subject area, let alone some science think-tank where most of them couldn’t even begin to comprehend the abstracts.
And of course, during their bickering Sunday night over whether or not a librarian would actually answer a phone call or e-mail on the weekend versus a song and dance live and in person, Rudy had been on the Net trying to find a place for everyone to initially meet up for coffee. He picked the most obvious winner, a Starbucks, even though it was a few blocks off campus at 40th Street.
Bad mothering. He must have looked in the wrong column for the address, because what should have been a Starbucks turned out to be a still-closed Allegro Pizza, and Monday morning they were waiting for him there, half his class, mostly guys trying to up their grades, and two lacrosse players who happened to room together, Katie Dulaney and Bethany Durst. Many had their arms folded and were stamping the cold off their feet. Rudy came up and gave an awkward greeting, then fumbled through an introduction of his young cousin from Vermont, Drake Barnes. Wolfie gave a slight nod, and no one really paid attention to him. He had on a sweatshirt with the hood up and convenience store sunglasses, looking more the dock worker than some ravishing Prince of Darkness. He was in a sullen mood, carried over from yesterday, that pretty much echoed everyone else’s sentiments when they found they had to walk all the way to 36th and Walnut, through the back end of a shabby neighborhood that had nothing better to look at than rundown fraternity houses
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