So, as recently mentioned, we flew to Ohio, this past weekend, to look at Denison University, my alma mater, for my daughter Charlotte. The specifics of the visit are of a very niche and ultimately private concern, but suffice to say, it was a great trip. Charlotte seemed to be engaged by what she saw, had a couple of great interviews and came away with a better understanding of the school as a possible target destination for her impending college years. Mission accomplished.
For me, that was the ultimate goal, but I also had a side interest in experiencing the place again for the first time in 32 years.
As is strenuously evident from even a casual perusal of this weblog, I am a laboriously sentimental nostalgist of the highest order. I assign massive emotional significance to certain periods of my past that, for whatever reason, I consider to have been crucially informative. For better or worse, I have always been this way.
While I had a great experience at Denison back in the distant `80s, I wasn’t exactly indicative of the typical Denison student, at the time. I did not join a fraternity. I didn’t give a single crap about the football team. I was not an econ major. I largely abhorred the ubiquitous reverence for the Grateful Dead. But, I found my tribe, so to speak. I immersed myself in the English and Art programs. I became a disc jockey on the college radio station and staffer on the school newspaper. But I was still a somewhat sneery kid from New York City, at heart. The otherwise preternaturally beautiful ranks of the student body didn’t really know what to make of me, nor I of them. At the same time, I managed to forge several meaningful friendships that carry on to this day. I had my heart broken by various girls along the way, but those dalliances usually fell apart more because of my myopic idiocy than any cruelty or indifference on their part. I don’t know that I was always that easy to hang around with, at the time.
In any case, my four years there were still a seismic experience for me. Having not been back on the campus apart from a brief, four-day visit in 1990, I was genuinely moved by the notion of going back.
We spent Saturday morning doing an information session, walking tour and interviews, and then broke for lunch, after which I was let off my leash so to speak, to go back and wander around the campus by myself.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find. I was reminded of several entries on this blog I’ve posted over the year about searching for that elusive “sense of place.” I’ve combed through the streets of New York City and stood in front of key addresses trying to feel some faint, fleeting semblance of various former concerns. Often times, I’ve come away with nothing, trying to evoke some intangible character from a chunk of real estate that bears no resemblance to some former iteration.
But back there at Denison, it was different. Sure, there was lots of new development, but a lot of the stuff was relatively unchanged. Here were the exact rooms and buildings more or less just as I’d left them. Once again, I’ve assigned so much significance to certain places in my memory, but often times the places themselves simply refuse to reciprocate. Sometimes a room just feels like a room – yeah, it’s a room you might have been in before, but not necessarily the same room you had all these indelible experiences in. It felt a bit like running into someone you used to date, but having them not recognize or remember you at all.
So, yeah, I wandered around to various spots (finding many of them locked), but ultimately felt like a bit of a ghost. The people I knew were no longer in any of them, nor was there any indication that they – or I – had ever been there.
At one instance, I snuck into my freshman year dormitory -- I realize this is invariably frowned upon, but I couldn’t resist. I climbed to the second floor and searched out my old room, amazingly finding the door open. Inside were two disgruntled juniors. I blabbed out a quick explanation of being an alumnus and asked if they would mind terribly if I just took a quick picture. They blearily looked at me, shrugged and acquiesced. I quickly stepped in and tried to replicate a shot I’d taken of the room back in the winter of 1985. I thanked them and ducked back out of the building.
The top shot below is my room in 1985. The shot beneath it is the same room from the same vantage point in 2021. Evidently, these guys aren’t big on decorating. One odd detail: If you look hard at the back of my door in the 1985 picture, you can see a THRASHER sticker (over a photograph of Agnostic Front I cut out of SPIN Magazine). Beneath it, in the 2021 shot, the kid with his back to the camera is wearing a THRASHER sweatshirt in almost the exact same spot.
I thought that was weird. Click on each to enlarge.
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