June 3, 8:50 a.m. — I got myself a double-coffee for a long day. One, I put in some soy milk, and the other some oat milk. A change is as good as a rest, and an onlooker looked approvingly.
I turned around from the coffee station in the reunion headquarters, and I found a group of five recent graduates.
“I have about 10 minutes before I head off to the memorial service,” I said, “which means I have about five minutes to alter your life’s path.”
I’ve done this a lot with groups of young people with my college, high school, and graduate school. Try to give some well-worn and cogent advice about the real world.
Much of it falls along the lines of, “Nobody is going to be as nice to you as we are,” and “Take the initiative and make the change you want to see.”
With my five minutes up, and my coffee downed, I ended the conversation and headed over to the chapel.
June 3, 10:15 a.m. — Seeing the names of our deceased classmates in the program (a surprisingly small one, in point of fact) still gives me pause after attending several of these memorials. Especially since most of us have less than half our lives left.
It was a great service and it was a chance for all of us to lift each other out of grief even if it meant just placing a white flower in a vase.
Hugs abounded and so did the memories as we moved over for our group picture on the library steps.
June 3, 3 p.m. — I walked into an off-campus building where I spent much of the last year and a half of my college life: the student newspaper.
In truth, I owe the paper a lot. The people who worked with me turned me from a person who was often clueless about how to express ideas into a person who would become the author of this site and kept it together for some 24 years.
I noticed that half of the tables in the newsroom had been removed. It struck me with a question: is this space to be repurposed as something else? The paper has changed its business model in the last few years, creating video and audio stories alongside a blog.
It still put out a Commencement series last week, as well as separate issues for the 25th and 50th Reunion classes. I remember contributing to a story by interviewing a scientist who discovered sonar in bats, which I thought was really cool.
June 3, 8 p.m. — We have classmates who are various stages of ill health. One could not travel because of discriminatory rules regarding power wheelchairs on aircraft. Another came and looked absolutely fabulous with her outfits.
But this evening, I saw a person who was in our class attended by two nurses while laying supine on a gurney.
It really hit me hard. It was sudden, seeing someone you spent time with completely still on a rolling contraption.
I remarked to some of the dorm staff the next day that I had a moment on seeing my classmate, wondering whether it would be the last time I would be coming to one of these reunion events.
June 4, 11 a.m. — While eating at our farewell brunch, I felt several hands on my back and shoulders at various times. These were classmates concerned about my Friday evening bout with Afib, and it was heartening to feel and hear the caring from them.
I’ve always called our class “The Class that Cares.” We sent people to help with a classmate who dripped over a stair heading into her dorm, hitting her head. Another group helped out a classmate who sprained her ankle on a staircase. And, classmates have been helping out others who were in various states of ill health.
Our class has set various records for attendance, participation, and fundraising the last 10 years. But numbers do not quantify kind words, a handshake, a hug, or catching up after years.
One person I caught up with was involved in a multi-year lawsuit against an on-campus institution. The classmate related some disappointment in the lack of total progress, but the truth is that there has been some incremental movement when it came to the situation. I told her I supported her and that one day the issue will be truly won.
June 4, 1:56 p.m. — We walked into a showing of the play “Evita,” met by a visual of a wedding dress suspended above the stage, and surrounded by seven stage-length trays of flowers creating a wall.
In the after-play talk with the director of the theater, that visual was discussed: the flowers, especially, came into play in the months after Eva Peron’s death in 1952. The sorrow and grief amongst the people of Argentina was such that cut flowers had to be imported from Paraguay in order to meet demand.
I left the theater and walked through the central business district one last time before heading over to my car. It was a rainy afternoon and there was change everywhere. The former home of a full-service travel agency (remember those?) is now a place that sells eyeglasses. The former shop for hip clothing is now a Mexican taqueria.
The space where a former German beer hall had been is now a pharmacy and a T-shirt shop. And a former convenience store now sells hamburgers.
June 4, 5:15 p.m. — The gorgonzola burger turned out well, especially with tots. But the raspberry-lime rickey seemed to have neither raspberries nor limes. I’ve gotten better at Sonic.
Anyway, it was time to make the trip home. I changed up my listening: streaming Kansas Public Radio’s show The Retro Cocktail Hour, which is a two-hour panoply of music invoking the South Pacific, tiki culture, and the space race. The musicians and arrangers, many of whom were from the swing and big-band eras, had to adapt in the era of stereo recording and the evolution of radio, movies and television.
Owing to how I felt after the one-day trip up, I booked a hotel in Connecticut to split my return drive in half. And it was a good thing, given the fact that there was not one, but three multi-lane milling and paving projects that backed up traffic for miles — on a Sunday evening.
I finally got to the hotel, just in time to tune into a blues station on the way up the hill.
And so to bed.
