reunion season

Driving me back up to campus Thursday afternoon during our near-daily car swap*, M. l'Oignon looked around at the various white tents and other party paraphernalia in place for the college's reunion weekend and observed that it made him all the sadder that we won't be going to our 15th reunion this Memorial Day.

(Instead, thanks to his employer's semi-annual trustees' meeting and a research grant from my institution, we're going to Europe for three weeks, specifically [and in this order] to the south of France, Paris, and London.  I know, it's rough.)

I'd looked forward in the abstract more to this coming reunion than to previous ones.  I felt lukewarm about the 5th, whose chief value, to my mind, had been that it would be a kind of coming-out party for M. l'Oignon and myself: we'd gotten involved the previous fall, but hadn't been involved during college, and so outing ourselves to people who knew the pre-history was something to look forward to.  (It was, indeed, quite satisfying.)  And I felt downright negatively towards the 10th, as though I'd simply be hanging out with a bunch of people who'd been his friends but not mine, as though my college friendships had withered, and so on.  I was also seven months pregnant at the time, so part of my crankiness may have been the sense that I'd be hanging out with a lot of drunk people when I couldn't drink myself.

The 10th turned out to be a blast, not least because of the pleasure of really connecting with people who *hadn't* been my or our closest friends in college, the people who felt like missed opportunities.  And I may have felt less alienated 10 years out than I had five years earlier.  At the 5th, I was in the midst of dissertating and was possibly at the height of my graduate school disdain for non-academic professions.  At the reunion, I was reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" for a summer seminar on narrative, and so hearing about my classmates' plans to enter business school or to work for this or that law firm felt deeply ironic.  ("I really like M[ergers] & A[cquisitions]" I remember one woman saying.  After making partner at a big firm, she left and, last I heard, had gone to cooking school.  That seems to be the great escapist fantasy of our generation.)

At the 10th, by contrast, people in those careers were less enamored of them, more able to see them as, well, careers.  And I, having -- frankly -- grown up a good bit, could also see that my choice of the academy was also simply the choice of a *career*, rather than some morally superior state of being.  (I'm probably being a bit harsh to my younger self, but I do think that one of the unfortunate and necessary elements of graduate school is a kind of conviction that your world is better and more satisfying than any other.  This may be true of any incredibly time-intensive career during its apprenticeship period.  I'm deeply torn when I hear about smart, interesting students who plan to go to graduate school: while I'm excited for them, I worry that they don't realize just how impossible it is to get the perfect job.)

The 15th feels in the abstract as though it would be more like the 10th than the 5th, with the added pleasure of the fact that there are sure to be lots of kids running around Squiss and Tricksy's ages.  In addition, I think that it's easiest to see people from your past when you're happy with your present; the current unbloggable firestorm aside, I'm deeply happy with where my career has taken me and most days I like my life enormously.  I don't have much to prove to my college classmates, and can even look forward with humor untouched by bitterness to seeing Famous Poet.**  In addition, I've corresponded more in the last year with my undergraduate mentors than I have since my first couple of years out, and so the thought of seeing them seems more natural and less random than it has in the past. 

I don't feel much nostalgia for college itself.  I never quite found the intellectual and social community I craved there, and if there's a period that feels as though it was, in retrospect, quite nearly perfect in that regard, it was probably my first two or three years of graduate school.  But as I write that I realize that my current situation goes that one better.  The one great thing about the firestorm is that it's made me all the more aware of my extraordinarily supportive community here, and the ways that it actually one-ups that grad school life because it's more varied (in discipline and field) and outward-looking. 

* We live close enough to campus to walk, but I drop both girls at school in the morning, which requires enough travel in a variety of directions that I take the car.  In the interests of fairness, as well as for a variety of other reasons M. l'O picks them up.  This means that at some point during the day I drive the car back down to him, either walking up or (more often) catching a ride.
** Famous Poet and I managed to be English majors at the same small college, graduating the same year, without ever taking a class with one another. That's largely because he gravitated toward Famous Old-School Critic and others of the senior faculty, while I gravitated toward several professors who (honestly) seemed both younger and More Hip.  There was always seem slight antipathy to our awareness of one another, I think, but I've never been able to pinpoint its origins or reasons.  When he came to Big Nearby City to start graduate school at Big Old Rich U (I went to Small New Poor U, in the same town), he then acted -- when we ran into each other at mutual friends' parties -- as though we'd been best friends and had some kind of shared history.  That pattern continued for some time as we crossed paths at reunions, and it always struck me as vaguely bizarre. He'd been or seemed to impressed with himself to talk to me while we were in college, and yet 2 or 5 or 10 years later always seemed delighted to see me.

Comments

[Grace]

Your relationship to famous poet echoes the relationship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy. AP wrote in Truth and Beauty about how they barely knew one another in college. Yet, when they went to grad school at the same university, they acted like they had been friends forever. It was expected that two people with a shared pedigree would be friends. So they behaved as if it were true.