It is odd, this time, being back on my college campus. In between my graduation mumblemumble-years ago and today I’ve visited the campus no less than a dozen times. The campus is one of those prototypical Virginia college campuses – neo-Georgian red-brick-and-white-trim buildings, wide brick walks spanning the campus (cleverly called the campus walk), lots and lots of green spaces and flowers in planters, professors switching to seersucker and poplin suits in the Spring… you get the idea. It’s always been familiar in a comfortable, not stale, way, despite some significant changes and additions to the physical plant. Home. Didn’t start out that way.
“Oh, fuck, I’m gonna get shot and my mom is gonna KILL me!” is the thought that sprang into my mind when I first started down campus walk. I had arrived on a Friday afternoon in the Spring of my junior year in high school. One of my maternal cousins was in her senior year here, and offered to let me crash with her for the weekend and get a feel for the place. While it was on my list of schools to think about, my first choice was Fordham, up in the Bronx. Coming from an all-male Jesuit high school in D.C. (the good one, not Georgetown Prep!), Fordham felt like a natural next step, even without taking into consideration that my maternal grandfather was a Fordham Prep, Fordham undergraduate and Fordham law graduate (he was many things, consistent among them, it seems). And having come up in the D.C. area when I did, in the middle of the Reagan-era crack and AIDS epidemics, I learned to walk heads-down, no eye contact, no acknowledgement of others on the sidewalks. So when classes let out around noon just as I was stepping onto campus walk, and the first person to pass me said, “Hi!”, I mean, is my reaction that far removed from plausible?
Truly, it freaked me out. And then I REALLY freaked out when ALMOST EVERY PERSON I PASSED SAID “HI!”, TOO!!! Seriously, I think my blood pressure issues started right there and then (treatment would come mumblemumble years later, because I’m a guy and a dope by definition). Turns out, this is just how it’s done. People are nice! To each other! Just because! And this, it turns out, was a shaping event, altering my trajectory as a person and a professional that impacts me to this day. I am forever grateful to my cousin for inviting me down. Where just moments before stepping on campus walk Fordham was the easy, natural next step, now I knew, knew, I was coming here.
Clearly, I have fond memories of the place and people (and, great, just great, I’ve now realized that I’m of an age where I use words like “fondly”, how did I get this old?) But it’s only recently that I’ve come to embrace my “alumni-ness”. In fact, for years and years I more closely associated myself with my high school than my college, despite the fact that many of my closest friends, and my wife!, are my college classmates. What was the turning point in my thinking? My kid.
I mean, of course it’s the kids’ fault! He decided two years ago to attend our alma mater, a decision he came to freely, of his own accord, and with minimal influence from his parental units (I know, I was there!). And as I think back on his college application/visit season, I believe it was then that I started to really link myself to my college in this new way. Not as a former student who lived in Randolph, and Custis, and Hamlet, but as an alum, paying tuition, and room and board, and book fees. And hearing about his friends, and his classes, and his games, no longer just remembering my own, altered another facet of my perception of self. Neither better nor worse, different. I’m as grateful to my kid as I am to my cousin for once again giving me the opportunity to change how I’m seeing things. I wonder how Kid #2 will alter my perception next. Kinda can’t wait, now that I know. In the meantime, Get Dirty! Go Wash!