Kevin, the beginning

My first memory of Kevin takes me back to the Spring of 1989 at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). I had just turned twenty and was a recent transfer from DePauw University. It was such an odd time for me, having spent almost an entire semester at home after a false start to my sophomore year at DePauw and now at a school affiliated with the church of my upbringing. It was a school that I’d visited on a few occasions in High School for special recruiting weekends with my church Youth Group but had never seriously considered as a college choice in my search for greater independence. My initial enthusiasm for pursuing a career in medicine was beginning to wane with nothing definite to replace it and I felt not a little lost and adrift. It was during this melancholy time that I first encountered Kevin McCarty.

“Encounter” might not be quite the right word, maybe “glimpsed” is more accurate. It was evening time and I was walking along a sidewalk on my way to the library to do a little studying (or was it a night class?). As I passed under the branches of a tree I heard a peculiar whizzing-whirring noise coming from up ahead near the library. I looked up and saw by the light of a street lamp someone approaching on a bike, but not just any bike. It was an adult tricycle, like the ones I’d seen as a kid ridden by old people with the basket on back. I quickly stepped off the sidewalk and deeper into the shadows of the tree. He was coming at quite a clip and did not see me, but what a magnificently weird wonder to behold! He had on a long trench coat whose tales were flapping wildly behind him as he whizzed by oblivious of my presence, like a phantom flitting through the night going who knows where.

I did not see much of Kevin the rest of that year and he remained in my mind just a tall oddly shaped man with very thick glasses that would occasionally materialize somewhere on campus. It was not until the Spring of 1990 when I’d changed my major to History/Political Science that I began to see him more often due to his attending Dr. Martin’s classes. Dr. Glenn Martin was a professor who I had become more and more captivated with over the Fall of 1989 mainly due to the fact I’d begun making friends with people who had come to IWU specifically to study with him. I began attending his Sunday morning class at College Church and was hooked. This was my “intellectual awakening”, an opening of my mind to new ways of thinking and a seminal college experience. It is also what initially bound Kevin and me together and provided a kind of context for the development of our friendship.