Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum every hour as the thaw proceeds.
Just beyond the graveyard the fraternity brothers will soon emerge from their beer-soaked dens to bask in the spring sunshine and advertise themselves to the world in general and the nearby sororities in particular. The sound of boom boxes and the scent of grilling meat will waft over the tombs of city fathers and their wives (as the subterranean female residents of these 20 acres are almost always referred to on the family grave stones), many of their young children, escaped slaves, Civil War dead — and down to us. “If music be the food of love, play on!” is how Shakespeare put it in the opening lines of *Twelfth Night*, though I’m not sure he had American fraternities in mind. These college students often serve up current musical fare with the burgers, but there is also a strong classical impulse among them: often I’ve heard the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” hammering the charcoaled air. Taste is not just a sense of the tongue and nose, but of the ear: rock ’n roll is the music of the college barbecue, and long will it be so.
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