The Column: One more shot at the old college try

At this time of year, when college kids are quitting summer jobs and heading back to school, I think of a dreamy road trip to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then an airplane ride to Denver, and my own unlikely embrace of higher education. Miracles never cease.

Had they been aware I was a college freshman in September 1959, teachers at Brooklyn Technical High School would have suffered dizzy spells and disorientation. Despite the faculty’s best efforts over four years, I bombed out big time — awful grades, no diploma, finished at night — and left Tech uncertain and adrift.

I visited the recruiting office but didn’t sign the papers. I went to work at a heating and ventilating place and drew little circles on mechanical drawings to show where toilets should be situated in apartment houses. I hauled tools for a plumber who muttered bawdy rhymes to himself as we went job to job.

If anyone mentioned college, I said, Sure, and maybe I’ll run for president, too, or play opposite Elizabeth Taylor in her next movie.

But things happened as they sometimes do, and with good advice and the endless patience of my parents, Winnie and Fred, I got another shot. The Soviets soon would send a spacecraft crashing into the moon and, more amazing, I was going to college — off the launch pad at last.

Anything beyond Brooklyn might as well have been Bangkok or Borneo in those days, but early one September morning, we left Bay Ridge, hit the Pennsylvania Turnpike before noon and, time flying fast as traffic, crossed into West Virginia near Wheeling.

Michael, my neighborhood friend, was driving his father’s ’49 Chevy and returning to the University of Cincinnati for architecture. Bill, another Brooklyn pal, and I were starting at the University of Denver — incredible for a couple guys who’d been nowhere.

(Why Denver? Far away. Got in.)

Now it was Ohio, green and agricultural with towns called New Concord and Sonora and Zanesville, which made me think of the writer Zane Grey, whose Western novels my parents kept in a redwood bookcase squeezed into our tiny apartment two floors above my grandmother, who owned the house.

We reached Cincinnati when there was still light and split up. Michael was back at school, a sophomore. Bill and I found a cheap hotel near the airport.

Down the road was a food stand and, beyond, a high school football field. A crowd was gathering for the game. We ate cheeseburgers — patties the size of salad plates, loaded with ketchup, mustard, lettuce and mayonnaise; Midwestern cuisine, we guessed — and sat in the stands under Friday night lights.

Next morning, Bill and I flew to Denver. Out there, the sky was clear, air cool, mountains purple. Far from Brooklyn, the future was upon us. I was dizzy with wonderment. What a world.

This year, those memories are especially sharp.

Bill died a while ago — sweet guy, loyal friend. And what do you know — I found Michael on the internet.

We exchanged emails, recalled old times on 69th Street and at Brooklyn Tech, where Michael excelled while I flunked plane geometry. We laughed at the way it was.

One Sunday, my wife, Wink, and I met Michael and his wife, Sandi, at a busy pizza place on 50th Street, just west of Eighth Avenue. The staff knew Michael and Sandi and greeted them with hugs.

For more than two hours, we talked — families, jobs, life. Swell people — kind, aware, involved.

“Would you have recognized Michael?” Sandi asked.

“In the mirror, sometimes I don’t recognize myself.”

More than 60 years — something, all right.

“Long time,” I said to Michael, as we left the restaurant.

“Long time,” he said.

We walked to Grand Central together, the four of us, took photos, promised to get together again.

On the way home, I thought of my mother and father and the faith they kept in their only child. I thought of how little they had and how they allowed me to have more — to catch a ride with Michael in a ’49 Chevy one bright, glorious Brooklyn morning and see where the road would take me.

Gift of love, right? Precious, heartfelt, enduring. I’m forever grateful to dear Winnie and Fred, especially in September.