No Valedictorians Here!
I know it seems harmless, wholesome, even, yet the Kenyon College Bookstore sealed my (rather less than stellar) academic fate. As this website claims, the customer can indeed eat Ben and Jerry's ice cream, pick up any of thousands of books without buying a printed thing, eat said ice cream in overstuffed chairs and, as if that weren't enough, talk to friends. It looks like a place to study but it isn't. It's a little like the bar in the neighboring town called "the office". You can always tell your wife that you're at the "office". If you tell your parents you've been spending too much time at the "bookstore" they might even increase your spending account there (which mine did). For my remainder-table reading, add-riddled, post-adolescent mind, the bookstore was a far more sinister presence than any binge-drinking party 20/20 would have you beleive I must have attended.
That said, I can recall a playwright in residence there surreptitiously studying and recording remarks in her laptop made by a student who, along with being upsettingly clever, had what could best be described as a radio announcer's voice from the 1940's. After a poetry seminar, a group of us who, I'm a little embarrassed to say though there were some damned smart people among us, considered ourselves the "good writers" went to the bookstore and chewed the fat until it closed. Having been introduced to adulthood in just this way, I thought it could only get better on the outside. It didn't.
On the day that I graduated, as I was buying some coffee (the kind that comes from a huge cylindrical stainless-steel urn) and taking a last look around, the owner of the bookstore yelled across to me from his desk/really big pile of random stuff: "Now go have beautiful children!."