Stuffed Rodent Heads.

No, that's not the latest underground delicacy or transgressive college food fad. Stuffed rodent heads is my personal shorthand reference to a little pub in the English countryside where I was fortunate enough to visit one summer between my second and third years of law school.

One of the nice things about doing well in law school and going to a high-ranked law school - I went to Columbia - is the almost amazing competition among law firms to get students to come work there. The result is that students at first-tier law schools get recruited very avidly, and the summer between the second and third years of law schools turns out to be a lovely boondoggle for law students. They are wined and dined, given (at times) interesting work, taken out for shows and parties and boat rides, and paid the same as a first-year associate, which back then, in the paleolithic year of 1983, wasn't as rich as it is now, but was still pretty good. In fact, my then-girlfriend and I had a fabulous, luxurious, fun-filled summer for almost no cost at all, which was lousy training for our eventual life together as husband and wife. But that's a tale for another day. The point here is that during the summer I made enough money to pay half my law school tuition for the following year (a student loan covered the other half) and still have some left over to cover a trip to England for ten days. It was a good trip.

I met my friend David at Gatwick Airport, and we spent a pretty hectic week and a half gamboling around Old Blighty. Being young and thus heedless, we rented a car and explored the countryside. (One day I'll write a post about the pleasures of driving on the left side of the street.) Our itinerary covered a bunch of scenic and historic towns far from London, stretching from Stratford-on-Avon to Bath to Stoke-on-Trent and on up to Chester, the Lake District and York, and then back down Cambridge, ending up back in London.

Our first night on the road was spent in Stratford-on-Avon. Being young and relatively penurious, we were willing to forego the pleasures of regular hotels to get cheap lodging. So we set about to find a nice bed and breakfast at the outskirts of town. Since we were good New Yorkers, we could not resist one at the edge of the town that was named "Brooklynne." The proprietor of the Brooklynne inn was a nice woman named Mrs. Barnacle. Unfortunately, when we asked Mrs. Barnacle after dinner what there was to do in the area of Stratford-on-Avon, she had no idea. So we ended up wandering around the outskirts of town and found our way into a local pub.

I don't remember the pub's name but I do remember that pub. How could I forget it? It was very dimly lit. Very dimly. We could see some of the clientele. Some of them seemed not to have moved a muscle in decades and probably had cobwebs under their arms. They all seemed so......... well, so dingy. But the pub itself was a wonder to see. It may have been a few hundred years old, with lots of wood beams and a wood plank floor. The tables lined the walls and spilled into the middle of the big room. The bar itself was a large rectangular affair jutting into the front of the room, with glasses hanging upside down from its top and rows upon rows of taps gracing the space behind the bartender. The guidebook we were using said that the drink of choice in that section of England was called "scrumpy," which was just a local name for hard apple cider. It came in varying degrees of hardness; the maximum one, I'm told, was so alcoholic it almost burned the nose to drink it. David and I stuckwith medium strength.

We sat down at one of the tables near a window. The place was almost deserted except for the immobile denizens at the front, so we had our choice of where to sit. One seat seemed as good or as bad as another because, after all, it's not like there was much of a view out the window -- just the unhurried side street where the pub was located. So we sat down and started on our scrumpy.

Only two sips into the mug I looked up just above head level and realized we were being watched. No, not by a passerby and not by a waiter. There was a stuffed chipmunk head on the wall, and the little rodent's eyes were fixed on us. I had never seen a stuffed chipmunk head hanging on a wall before. A stuffed moose head, yes. A stuffed bear head, yes. But a chipmunk? Who would bother to pay a taxidermist to stuff the head of a chipmunk, much less mount it on the wall? Could it really have been someone's hunting trophy?

Actually, it probably wasn't a hunting trophy. I knew that because, as it turns out, every open wall space had a small stuffed rodent head on it. Not only that, but the stuffed rodent heads were all wearing clothes: each one had a small cap and a little wool scarf wrapped around its dead stuffed neck. There were chipmunks, squirrels, what looked like raccoons, some other varmint-like things. They all were attired in caps and scarves, very colorful caps and scarves, in an array of plaids and tweeds. They all looked solemn. And we were apparently the only people to take notice of them. Everyone else in the place was looking down into their glasses of whatever they were drinking. Apparently they were used to having stuffed rodent heads gazing down at them from the pub walls.

We were young back then and didn't have the nerve to actually ask someone why there were stuffed rodent heads all over the walls. It was England, after all, and from what we had heard the place was supposed to be a bit eccentric.

Looking back on it now, though, the stuffed rodent heads are nothing more than the prime example of "different strokes for different folks." No doubt the cobweb-festooned denizens of the place thought it was perfectly natural to have their drinking overseen by a collection of wall-mounted, scarf-bedecked, haberdashery-wearing furry mammals. After all, they had probably been doing it for years. So why not?

That's why, when I see someone doing something that initially strikes me as unusual, what I immediately think of is stuffed rodent heads.

Question of the day.

"How come you don't write about sex? When are you going to discuss sex?"

Soon, my friends. I promise.

Huh? When did that happen?

"That" being becoming an adult.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that maybe I was leaving adolescence behind. I was 21 years old and was visiting a friend of mine who had moved out of her parents' house after a monstrous spat with her mother. We were both in college at the time. Not a fancy private school, or even a state school with a dorm -- no, we both went to Queens College, of the City University of New York. A commuter school. Which meant, for most students, living at home and coming to the campus for classes -- in other words, a lot like high school, only with more advanced classes and fewer rules. Oh, and also with alcohol, because back then - December 1980 - the drinking age was 18, so the student union building had a pub.

My friend -- let's call her Josie -- had rented the basement of a house up the block from the college's parking lot. She shared it with another girl who wasn't around all that much. The basement was just a big room, with a kitchen area on one side and a bathroom. I seem to remember she also had a television. I have no idea what the landlady charged Josie for the room, nor do I have any clue how Josie paid for it. I did like her company quite a bit, though, so I used to visit her a couple of times a week. A side benefit of these visits was that I got away from the prying eyes of my mother. At age 21 my patience for parental supervision was wearing very thin.

A few weeks into the semester I started going out with Karine. She was a petite little fireball, intense and strong-willed, head-turningly pretty. Naturally I brought her over to Josie's place, and the two of them hit it right off, which pleased me to no end. One day we were sitting around and laughing, just having a good time, when Josie pulled out her bag of weed and a packet of rolling papers. "Shall we?" she grinned at us. Karine gave a slight shrug. She used to be in art school and had taken acid at one point. Conventional wisdom in her art school was that it opened up the mind and increased creativity. After a few encounters with lysergic hallucinations she had decided that she was already quite creative enough. But by then the acid was already in her system, and too much grass gave her flashbacks. She didn't want to be a party pooper, though. So she looked at Josie and said, "Sure, I'll take a hit or two." She leaned against my shoulder and I reached over to take the joint that by then Josie had lit and smoked. I inhaled, deeply, and handed the joint to Karine. She took a hit and passed it back to Josie. We went around a couple of times, then Karine decided to stop. Josie and I finished the joint.

Josie's taste in music was folkier than mine, so she put Crosby, Stills & Nash on the turntable. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" poured into the room, the falsetto harmonies settling on our heads. I felt the familiar heaviness of the high crowd the interior of my head, nudging gently at my temples from inside. I looked over at Karine. She was relaxed against me, nuzzling into my shoulder. Josie was smiling, swaying slightly to the voices and acoustic guitar. "Chestnut brown canary, ruby throated sparrow........" The warmth of friendship and camaraderie was palpable.

But the inside of my head was heavy and my thoughts were coming slow and tangled. This was what always happened when I got high. Not that I did it too often. I was more of a social toker than anything else: I did it with friends, just to party, not to be left out, not to be thought a drudge. And I had always told myself it was fun, never let myself think it possibly wasn't. After all, I would be a drag, stodgy and square, if I said I didn't really like it. I had to fit in, didn't I? Or so I thought. Or so I required myself to think.

Until that day. The heaviness still was in my head when I heard myself thinking "You know, you don't really like this. You don't have to do this just because other people are doing it." Karine's breathing seemed warm and deep as she leaned against me. I heard my thought again, then pondered it. "You don't really have to do this just because other people are doing it."

What a concept. I knew it was true. I just had to adjust to it. I had never thought of refusing to go along with the crowd before. Maybe it was time.

After a while the high passed. We bid Josie good night and I drove Karine home. That was the last time I got high. And it was the first time I realized that I was leaving my teenage mindset behind - I didn't have to do things I didnt' really want to do just because they were "the thing to do." If the mark of adulthood is makng your own decisions and not just running with the pack, that was when my adulthood started.

What's interesting, though, is that even today I don't really feel like the proverbial "grown up." Oh, I certainly do have the job, the family, the responsibility. I sit behind a desk and speak on the phone, make decisions, give advice, write important-looking letters and do all those other adult things. I even look like an adult. But in my head I'm still 22. The slight paunch, receding hairline and increasingly creaky joints have done nothing to advance my mental age. I'm 22 in my mind and so far nothing has happend to change that.

I wonder, though, whether I'll have another moment like that one in Josie's apartment, when it will suddenly dawn on me with crystalline clarity that yes, I'm almost 50 years old and that life isn't in the future -- it's here, right now, every minute passing by precious and irreplaceable. Would I even want to understand that other than intellectually? Isn't the 22-year-old's prospect of future possibilities and things yet to be discovered much more exciting, even if it means less respect for the passage of time? Not that there isn't much to be said for savoring every moment, but perhaps doing that also brings with it the end of optimism, and some resignation about where one is in life and how much it can change.

I'm not sure I want it.