In a northwesterly corner of the campus where West Cantey and Stadium meet, there are two low, unimposing buildings of relatively recent vintage. Their cream-colored "TCU brick" identify them as an undeniable part of the university, and their signs proclaim them as the (Jack) Miller Speech-Hearing Clinic and the Starpoint School. Built between 1975 and 1978, they have a lot to do with the nurture of our children, and those who come to these bright classrooms are children struggling with learning disabilities and hearing and speech impairments. They have doors to learning opened to them in special ways.

In my ignorance, I like to think that the hand of a special providence guided the particular location of these classrooms, for that plot of land was where I came, early in my own greening, to learn from the teachers--and it is just possible that prairie children before me, and Indian children before them, came also here to learn. Like the students at Miller and Starpoint, but more fortunate of faculties than they, I was brought to that place, too, to have shown and explained to me some of the wondrous mysteries that make the fabric of life rich and radiant.

In my young years, you see, that part of our campus was an untended field. In late summer, it supported great stands of Johnson grass and the tall Texas thistles. It hosted hardy weeds and grasses in winter, and in the spring, came the wildflowers. To say that the field lay profuse with bloom would be to minimize the fact. Grade-school teachers from across the street at Alice E. Carlson would sometimes lead their small charges into the spring fields to experience the season first-hand and to just stand and know of the joy in being a part of all that color and smell and touch, while the insects buzzed and flitted about us, busy in the care of their fecund world.

Before I was old enough for the Carlson teachers, though, I knew of the field and the singular treasures it held. My home was only two blocks away on Rogers, and my father was a biologist, so he was naturally drawn there. My sister and I were often privileged to go with him on short collecting trips and often it would be to this field. We would arm ourselves with the naturalist's tools--black-topped collecting bottles, forceps, magnifying glass, and the bug net that my mother had somehow known to make from a broom handle, wire hoop, and soft, white gauzelike material. Since we visited the field often, we were, no doubt, a familiar sight to frequent passersby--the young professor with his two small daughters, all heads down and bottoms up among the gay dancing colors, pointing and picking, giggling with delight in the day.

We would wade happily into the flowers, recognizing our favorites and calling out, for the teacher's approval, the names he had taught us: Indian blanket, Indian paint brush, wine cup, verbena, fox glove, primrose, and my favorite, the little "powderpuff" Sweet Briar, a low-growing sensitive plant whose leaves folded at a touch, and whose pink blossom was a tiny, perfect ball of soft, pollen-tipped stamens. Although specimens were taken, we weren't wanton collectors, catching and killing all in our path. Led by our teacher, we would turn over the rocks to reveal the centipedes, millipedes, pill-bugs and other light-shy crawly creatures of the field. Then we courteously returned their world to the way we had found it, so as not to disturb the ecology. The net was mostly used to capture flying insects in order to examine them more closely, and then let them go.

It was in this way that I learned of the incredible delicacy of a wasp's window-paned wings and of the many fantasy forms of butterflies. I viewed up-close a grasshopper's mandibles and a ladybug's flying wings that fold away under the hard carapace. And the flowers we picked usually went home in tight fists to present to Mother, who patiently heard all the names repeated again, while placing the limp and dying bouquet in a glass of water to be displayed on windowsill or table.

Several years later, I remember the higher grades at Alice Carlson used the field as a temporary practice track for the relay teams chosen to run in the annual Fort Worth Public Schools Relays at Farrington Field. With large rocks marking the "stations," the path of the crude track was formed quite literally by our pounding feet, grasshoppers whirring before us and the grasses licking our bare legs. We learned to run with effort and as a team, giving our "personal best," and one glorious spring we beat the heralded bare-foot swifts from Denver Ave.--but that belongs in another story.

Sometime, perhaps in the fifties, the field was mown and drill groups and the TCU Marching Band made use of its flat, level surface to practice maneuvers. It was inevitable that with the regular marching and the regular mowing, the flowers, weeds, and animal life would disappear. But, all that while, the vision and inspiration of teachers like Dorothy Bell and Marguerite Slater and the generosity of the Clarence B. Smiths and of Alice Neeley were moving toward each other to create the programs and the buildings for new classrooms for the children. The land would be returned to them.

The Miller and Starpoint children come now, as I did in another time, to learn in that place in a special way. And-- I think the field approves.

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