Finding myself at a college reunion

My first thought on seeing my husband's college classmates assembled for their 40th reunion was Who are all these old people? Not only because they are, in fact, old--a whole two years older than I am--but because I really didn't know a whole lot of his classmates 40 years ago and I don't know them any better now. But I enjoyed visiting with the woman who preceded me as editor of our college newspaper and marveling over the incredible improvements in the college's journalism facilities.

We used to put together the college paper in a spare room in the basement of a women's dorm; now, the college has a whole fancy-schmantsy high-tech building dedicated to print and broadcast journalism. When we pasted up the newspaper (using a wonky wax machine to position hard copy on layout sheets), our work often extended past curfew, in which case we had to call Campus Security to get an officer to walk us across campus and let us in our dorms. 

Which are gone. In fact, nearly every place I inhabited in that little college community has been torn down. In my freshman year, eleven of us were housed in an overflow dorm near campus, although calling it a dorm is misleading. It was an old white frame house with bunk-beds crammed into every available nook and cranny. The spot where it sat is now a parking lot, as is just about every other place I lived. My husband's first dorm is now the admissions office. And the library where I spent so much of my time was transformed into a student center after the new (and very impressive) library was built in 2020.

So the campus has changed and the people have changed and the dress code has really changed. Women had to wear dresses or skirts pretty much all the time; if we wanted to run on the college track, we would put a denim wrap skirt over our shorts lest anyone should be offended by the sight of knees while we walked up the hill to the athletic fields. I remember once that the wife of a Trustee complained to the college administration because the yearbook showed too many women wearing pants, and if a woman had shown up in the college chapel wearing a pants suit, the dean of women would have had heart failure on the spot.

So it was a little disconcerting to see all these old people wandering around the sacred environs in (gasp!) shorts and T-shirts, many of the men violating the former dress code by sporting facial hair. Some of them even had hair that fell below the level of their shirt collar, though many more had no hair at all. (Because they are old. As am I.)

I found myself in the basement of the chapel, where pictures of each graduating class line the walls. In my senior photo, I look like a ghost with a perm. I'm wearing a gray wool skirt suit that I remember well, because I sewed it myself after smuggling my sewing machine into my dorm room. (Ancient electrical wiring--excess appliances not allowed!) I bought the gray wool fabric to coordinate with some antique mother-of-pearl buttons I found at a flea market, because back then I was capable of buying yards and yards of wool to match a set of pretty buttons and turning the whole thing into my best skirt suit in my spare time. Who is that person and where did she go?

Ultimately, she went home. It was interesting to commune with my former self over the weekend but it's good to be home, where my sewing machine barely runs and I don't have to worry about dress codes and my house hasn't been converted into a parking lot. My alma mater played a big part in getting me where I am today, a lot older and maybe a little bit wiser--and with a lot less hair. I mean, who was that person?