She was just a young mother—maybe a single mother, I considered, because she’d had no one to leave the baby with when she went out for the pizza. A responsible young mother, I decided, because she’d not left the baby in her car—not in the parking lot at Roland’s, not this late at night. And the poor woman had the misfortune to run into me. I looked like any writer and former wrestler at that time of night; I’d scared her as badly as any of the lowlifes who hung out at Roland’s might have. Not to mention what an awful thing I said to her: I’d told her she had balls for going public. What might such an awful thing have meant to a young mother with a baby, late at night?

“And then you told her you mistook her for someone else?” Mr. Barlow asked me, when we were eating our pizza—after I’d related the saga to him. “It’s a good thing we’re both leaving Exeter, finally,” the snowshoer said. “She wasn’t anyone we know, was she?”

In the harsh light of this embarrassing encounter with the young mother who was not the haunting woman with the baby carriage from The Wrong Car, I was relieved I’d taken a teaching job at one of those fly-by-night colleges created by an increasing resistance to the draft. The pushback to the draft was borne of the anti-war movement. New colleges were created, and they didn’t have the highest academic standards. Previously, if you wanted to take advantage of a student deferment from the draft, but you were no great shakes as a student, you could be hard put to find a college that would admit you. The Military Selective Service Act of 1967 expanded the ages of conscription from eighteen to thirty-five. It still granted student deferments, but your deferment ended upon your completion of a four-year degree—or your twenty-fourth birthday, whichever came first.

These colleges were fly-by-night financial opportunities for their enterprising founders, and for those of us who taught in them for a time; yet these institutions, of less-than-higher learning, were also borne of a moral condemnation of the Vietnam War and the draft. What I would discover about teaching in such a college is that there were moral dilemmas for a teacher, too. There were students who simply didn’t or couldn’t do the work; there were students who rarely came to class, and students who plagiarized. Plagiarism was punishable by dismissal, but if you expelled a male student from college, you could be sending him to Vietnam, posing a moral dilemma. And if you didn’t expel him, could you justify expelling a female student for cheating, just because she was safe from the war? The politics of the war made you consider the male and female students differently. Certainly that was a moral dilemma, too.