You Can’t Go Home Again... But You Can Visit For The Weekend
If you’re expecting a political rant this week, I’ve decided to take a break. Not for lack of topics, mind you, but because it is not politics that is on my mind. I’ve been thinking about college.
This past weekend, I took advantage of Labor Day to jet off to Vermont. It’s not the easiest trip to make, even by plane, from Texas, but more than worth it. I graduated from Middlebury College and had only managed to make it back a few times since I left in 1994. Even better, it was an opportunity to reconnect with old friends, most of whom I hadn’t seen in a decade. It had all the advantages of a college reunion, without the tedium of pretending to remember people you’d long forgotten.
I did my share of partying in college, but more often than not on a weekend night I was to be found in Munroe Hall, room 407, pretending to be someone else, on some sort of mad mission. I was one of
those. A role-player. A Dungeons & Dragons devotee. I make no apologies, and will admit that I still play, even if not every weekend. The people I was getting together with last weekend were my fellow crazies.
There is always a danger to these kinds of reunions. To state the obvious, people change over a decade. A lot. I took it for granted that my friends would not be the same people that I knew in the early ‘90s, but would they have changed so much that I wouldn’t like them anymore? Not likely, but a risk, to be sure. We had scattered from one end of the country to the other, from Zsolt, who stayed in Middlebury, to Jon, who came from Lake Tahoe, and we had taken jobs ranging from I.T. to leading a synagogue. We had become husbands, fathers. Would rolling dice and slaying monsters until the wee hours of the morning be as fun as it used to?
On that count, I needn’t have worried. It was amazing to me how quickly we fell back into old, familiar roles. And that was comforting. It was if no time had passed at all, really. We had changed—hell, even the rules of Dungeons & Dragons had changed—but the things that made me want to fly halfway across the country to spend time with these people hadn’t changed: the jokes, the shorthand, the alliances, the rivalries.
It was not the people that disappointed me, but rather my alma mater. A group of us took advantage of a sunny, pleasant Vermont summer day to walk around the campus of Middlebury College. I was surprised, not necessarily pleasantly, by all the changes on campus since I had last been there in 2000.
My wife and I recently had a debate about the most beautiful college campus. My wife, who lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for a year argued heavily for UNC-Chapel Hill. For me, it will always be Middlebury College, but the building boom of the last few years have not added to its beauty. For me, the best thing was to wake up and be able to see the Green Mountains from my dorm room, or anywhere on campus. Unfortunately, those sight lines have been spoiled and the campus is beginning to have a cramped and “busy” feel.
Ah well. Life moves on and people, and institutions, have to continue to change and grow. You can’t go home again. But sometimes you can visit for the weekend.
