Death of a Campus

A few months ago, I received notice that my alma mater was closing.  The reasons are unimportant, for the deal is already done.  The academic programs have been transferred to another institution and classes have begun under the new administration.  This past Friday, however, a photo was posted to an alumni site, showing a moving van in front of the building.  That image caught me by surprise and almost undid me.

As sad as it was to hear about the college closing, the move from the campus was much worse.  My collegiate time there is done; college campuses are fickle in a four year cycle.  Wait a few years to go back and it's almost as if you were never there at all.  The new students have moved in and claimed it as their own.  It doesn't matter if you were the Student Body President or Newspaper Editor or Sorority Sweetheart four years running - someone else fills those shoes now.  Pull a good prank and you might get a flicker of vague recognition: "Oh, that was you?  Yeah, I heard about that one."  But by in large, once you're gone, you're history.

But the campus, oh the campus.  That's another story.  Because the campus is always there.  The campus is the backdrop to my undergraduate years.  It's the third party in all my pictures.  It's the constant for each class.  No matter how long ago I attended, I lived in the same rooms as the most recent class, studied in the same classrooms, ate in the same dining hall.  We all skipped out of chapel through the same door, climbed the same fence near the front gate, and hopped over the same clogged drainpipe outside the classroom door.  My pictures of the place are suddenly not adequate, for they all show the campus only in the blurry background.  The physical setting wasn't important at the time - why would it be?  It's not like its going anywhere, reasoned my younger self.  Today I rake through the piles of photos, all showing smiling college students in the snow, on the soccer field, at the picnic tables, at the basketball games....all blocking the background that I'm now so desperate to see.

Even if I had a plethora of photos to remember, though, there's no substitute for the real thing.  We as humans love to be where things happened.  There's just something about being in the same proximity to certain events.  It's why we visit historical battlefields, pilgrimage to Graceland, flock to monuments.  Something important happened right where I'm standing, we think.  And now I'm part of it.  And something important happened on my campus.  I grew up, I discovered myself, I learned more than I bargained for, I made lifelong friends, I had my heart broken, I cried as if there would be no tomorrow, I fell in love, I felt like I could take on the world, I was changed... And I remember all these things as I walk around, as I step into the basement classroom and get that first musty whiff, as I catch a glimpse of the scoring table, as I run my hands over the piano that I spent so many practice hours on, as I walk down the halls that I walked tens and hundreds of times over my years there.  This was the door that I was opening when I was bombarded by waterballoons on the way back from play practice.  That was the window that we accidentally broke minutes before the Dean of Students walked by.  Here is the door you could sneak out of after hours because it was far enough away from the RAs room.  This is the corner of the classroom that I was sitting in when I first met my roommate.  That is the soccer field where we dragged that old couch to the middle and hung out until the night was dark and deep.  This is the parking lot where I walked right past my newly acquired car because I couldn't remember what it looked like.

All these memories are triggered by simply being there.  All these stories that make sense to only me and my fellow alumni.  All these landmarks that I won't be able to share with my children anymore.  The older ones have been to the campus many times; they have heard some of our stories and seen our old haunts.  The younger ones will grow up listening to the stories we tell without any frame of reference.  They won't get the chance to kick the soccer ball on the same field dad did, or walk into the office where mom worked, or drive around the back of the gym where we would sneak a quick forbidden kiss.  All these moments live on for me while the campus still stands.

Strangely enough, I am the second generation to live this.  My parents are also alumni of the same institution, although they attended when it was located elsewhere.  For years afterwards, my sisters and I would find ourselves in the back of the station wagon, not knowing where we were going, when suddenly the car would slow to a crawl on a block of vacant, dilapidated buildings.  My parents in the front seat would murmur to each other and point to places in the past, scenes only they could see.  They would occasionally narrate their memories to us, but we just rolled our eyes and whined to go home.  Then the inevitable day came when we turned on the familiar block only to find that it had been completely razed.  Where they once lived and worked and learned and lived was now nothing but an empty lot.  Surely we can go home now, we thought.  But once again, the car slowed to a crawl, and my parents pointed out to each other where the buildings used to be, and the memories still came.  That was the last time we ever went down there.

And so my memories will be one day gone as well.  I'll always remember my years spent there, always have friends and fellow alumni to jog my memory.  But the campus itself will no longer be my talisman, able to conjure up a thousand thoughts just by driving through the gates.  It's sad, much more sad that I expected it to be.  But life goes on.  And it will be converted to a new purpose and others will make their own memories there, far different than mine.  But it will always be my campus.