I attended my 30th college reunion this past weekend. Beloved Husband, who graduated a year before I did, joined me. (We had attended his reunion last year, so it was only fitting that we go to mine as well.) Without the spectre of the bar hanging over my head (as it did last year), it was a good experience for us to revisit old haunts together. We had spent so little time together on campus back in Days of Yore, having started dating just a month before he graduated and moved home to this desert land, leaving me there in the green humidity of the college campus. It was a full circle, to be on campus together once more.
So much water under the bridge in the past thirty years.
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Reunions were well attended by my classmates. It was a strange experience, to see people I had not seen for three decades, and not only to talk with them about where we all are now, but also to reminisce about Back Then.
I was struck first, by the fact that some people remembered me at all -- I never considered myself to be a particularly social or visible person. And then I was struck more, by the little things people remembered about me: the fact that I had named my rubber tree plant my freshman year (though we could not recollect what the plant's name was); or that when I made announcements in the dining facility, I would do so by standing on a chair and calling out, "PEOPLES". Other stories with details so minuscule as to be like grains of sand on the path of my life -- yet those details were part of the lore surrounding me, embedded in others' memories for all these years.
One woman was there with her son, who now attends the same school. She eagerly called him over to meet me, and told him: "THIS is the person I was telling you about." She explained: when she was a freshman and floundering in her major and unsure what to do, I spoke to her at length and advised her. And I saved her. She emphasized to her son that I was the kind of person he should find at college: someone who can listen and help.
Bless her. I didn't know I had had such an impact. At all.
I was humbled. I am still humbled.
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I think back to the person I was in college, and I wonder how similar I am to that young woman of ages ago. College was not easy -- I think of college as being a lonely and isolating experience. Perhaps, though, my internal viewpoint does not fully reflect how things were.
I heard the stories of others, and I miss her: that person with a youthful exuberance, a joie de vivre. I feel as though I may have lost the woman I once was so long ago. Or perhaps she is not truly lost. Perhaps she is just a bit buried.
I am going to try to find that person inside me again -- the person who names rubber trees; who plants tiny seeds of moments that grow into meaningful memories. I would like that.
One day at a time. We shall see where the road goes.
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:)
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