Where Everybody Knows Your Name
This past weekend for the first time in four years, I visited my college campus for Homecoming Weekend. It was a weekend of conflicting emotions. The campus was charmingly the same, yet completely different. The people were achingly familiar but strangers the same. The whole visit was at once exhilirating and tremendously disappointing. All things I'd expect to feel after having a decade of real life separating me from those good ol' days.
By far the biggest disappointment was the eerie solitude of the campus on the big Game Day. As I walked with Dan and my college roommate and her fiance, there was nary a student to be found... anywhere. We walked into unlocked buildings, turned on lights in two empty theatres, popped into the gym/field house, peeked into the library, browsed the campus bookstore, pressed our noses to the locked glass doors of the new cafeteria... and wondered where the hell everyone was. Even the disc jockey at my old radio station haunt was a "townie" -- working a non-student weekend shift.
Down at the alumni tent, the numbers were only slightly more encouraging. Members of the classes ending in "5" or "0" were celebrating reunions. The beer taps were flowing, and the buffet was pleasant. Amid the memories and the cameras and nametags and the orange-shirted alumni staff there were a familiar faces. A former party lush with a baby stroller, That annoying sorority sister who's name escapes me but whom ALWAYS remembers me at these things, the guy who I had a crush on who married his college sweetheart only to divorce 8 years and a couple of kids later.
But outside the tent, empty campus greens begged for picnickers, idle healthclub treadmills languished, overstuffed club chairs in the library remained cold. There were no campus tours. No students hammering away in the theatre scene shop. No students lining up around the spanking new Mongolian grill in the caf.
This was not a wild crazy campus when I was here, but there was a sense of a campus community. That does not seem to exist any more. Back in the day people didn't leave campus for the weekend -- there was a heart and a soul beating beneath it all. We were all overstretched to our limit with extracurricular activities, parties, and get togethers. And on a lovely fall weekend there were frisbees to be tossed, lines to be memorized, books to be opened, and friends to enjoy. Where are today's students and what are they doing with their lovely fall weekends?
But the alma mater, she did look ravishing in the September sun. Even with the many new buildings and all of the changes, the campus remains as I remember it in my heart, in all of its red brick, tree-lined, ivy-covered glory. It remains heartbreakingly beautiful in that Rockwell-esque, snow-globe kind of way.
It all provided fodder for many conversations for the afternoon and all through the ride back to my college roomie's house where we stayed that night. Rhetorical and philosophical questions: Are we mis-remembering how great it was? Are today's students just different? More absorbed in internet and video games and less with the outside enchantments that campus life provides? Did we decide to go to this school because it looked so quintessentially academic and beautiful, rather than weigh the rigors of the academic program? Does it matter? And more important questions: When did college students start looking so young? How did I get out of four years without ever trying a beer funnel? Why do I regret that in a sick way?
The weekend was not a total loss. There were upsides to the low alumni attendance and apparent mass abduction of the underclassmen. We had a sweet parking space with no trouble. There was no line at our favorite downtown restaurant. The football team was brilliantly terrible as always. There were many other little delights as well, not the least of which was connecting with the friends who were there, including the roomie, and my favorite bourgeois deviant and his wife. Friends who are the real pillars of the campus I remember, friends who provided the memories, and the education, that I prize most dearly.
By far the biggest disappointment was the eerie solitude of the campus on the big Game Day. As I walked with Dan and my college roommate and her fiance, there was nary a student to be found... anywhere. We walked into unlocked buildings, turned on lights in two empty theatres, popped into the gym/field house, peeked into the library, browsed the campus bookstore, pressed our noses to the locked glass doors of the new cafeteria... and wondered where the hell everyone was. Even the disc jockey at my old radio station haunt was a "townie" -- working a non-student weekend shift.
Down at the alumni tent, the numbers were only slightly more encouraging. Members of the classes ending in "5" or "0" were celebrating reunions. The beer taps were flowing, and the buffet was pleasant. Amid the memories and the cameras and nametags and the orange-shirted alumni staff there were a familiar faces. A former party lush with a baby stroller, That annoying sorority sister who's name escapes me but whom ALWAYS remembers me at these things, the guy who I had a crush on who married his college sweetheart only to divorce 8 years and a couple of kids later.
But outside the tent, empty campus greens begged for picnickers, idle healthclub treadmills languished, overstuffed club chairs in the library remained cold. There were no campus tours. No students hammering away in the theatre scene shop. No students lining up around the spanking new Mongolian grill in the caf.
This was not a wild crazy campus when I was here, but there was a sense of a campus community. That does not seem to exist any more. Back in the day people didn't leave campus for the weekend -- there was a heart and a soul beating beneath it all. We were all overstretched to our limit with extracurricular activities, parties, and get togethers. And on a lovely fall weekend there were frisbees to be tossed, lines to be memorized, books to be opened, and friends to enjoy. Where are today's students and what are they doing with their lovely fall weekends?
But the alma mater, she did look ravishing in the September sun. Even with the many new buildings and all of the changes, the campus remains as I remember it in my heart, in all of its red brick, tree-lined, ivy-covered glory. It remains heartbreakingly beautiful in that Rockwell-esque, snow-globe kind of way.
It all provided fodder for many conversations for the afternoon and all through the ride back to my college roomie's house where we stayed that night. Rhetorical and philosophical questions: Are we mis-remembering how great it was? Are today's students just different? More absorbed in internet and video games and less with the outside enchantments that campus life provides? Did we decide to go to this school because it looked so quintessentially academic and beautiful, rather than weigh the rigors of the academic program? Does it matter? And more important questions: When did college students start looking so young? How did I get out of four years without ever trying a beer funnel? Why do I regret that in a sick way?
The weekend was not a total loss. There were upsides to the low alumni attendance and apparent mass abduction of the underclassmen. We had a sweet parking space with no trouble. There was no line at our favorite downtown restaurant. The football team was brilliantly terrible as always. There were many other little delights as well, not the least of which was connecting with the friends who were there, including the roomie, and my favorite bourgeois deviant and his wife. Friends who are the real pillars of the campus I remember, friends who provided the memories, and the education, that I prize most dearly.
posted by Martha Who? | 5:05 PM
1 Comments:
You iz 1 elegant pers'n @ the werd writ'n. Dang!
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