Over the past thirty years, the first weekend in June (or thereabouts) comes with it a perennial invitation to go back to school for the weekend. The most brilliant of fundraising techniques, our university offers a free party for four out of five Junes. On the fifth—or the majors—we pay and cover the way for the off-year classes who show up in lesser numbers. We have found off-year reunions can be just as much fun.

One of the many casualties of the pandemic was the cancelling of the past two reunions, our 29^th and our 30^th. While I am keenly aware of far greater tragedies, this was still a loss in my little universe. It’s hard to understate the gift of seeing two of my favorite groups of people, the classes of ’90 and ’91, sculpted by the elements of life—recognizable yet startlingly more true. Like a photograph in reverse. I love beyond measure that I can hold the children we once were next to the parents, professionals, people we have become. The alchemy of these moments sparks my soul with life. The best times are when we fall deep into conversation about how difficult certain chapters have been and how we have managed to navigate in this infinite unknown to which we awake each day.

When the university cancelled this round of reunions, I realized we would go from 47 to 57 without one of these alchemic moments of revisiting. A big decade to jump.

Last year at about this time in June [before Ohio was even an idea], I was sitting on the couch at home in Massachusetts making an orange and black collage of PAW images. I heard that a few friends went to campus and walked the p-rade route anyway. This planted a seed.

When our class’s most loyal reunions attendee (all majors and minors for the past 30 years) posted on Facebook that he would be walking the route, my first step was to Google Maps. How far am I, really? Then to the dog boarder. Then to my frequent reunions companion and classmate, known for her willingness to engage in my sometimes outrageous spontaneity (like Dear Evan Hansen, days before the Tonys). Want to walk around campus with me on Saturday? (As if it’s not 6 hours each way).

Someone recently asked where our happy places are. Paris. London. A beach somewhere…

For me? Yep, it’s New Jersey.

I learned that my college home is almost exactly a straight shot east from our spot in Ohio. (This explains something: the brutal summer weather.) Also, I learned that just going to campus for a few hours feels amazing.

In the past, I have arrived on campus from the north, the south and the east, but never from the west. Coming up from the Pennsylvania pike, through farm towns and into New Jersey, as soon as I saw signs that I was ninety minutes away, I was like a kid at Christmas.

*

Upon arrival in town, I lose my sense of the present and become one with a constancy of self. I am now, just as I was then. I see more now, as I wished to see then. I wish I could give today’s me to yesterday’s. Sort of. But I also loved the freedom in the not knowing almost as much as I yearned for the knowing. I hold tender some of the youthful faith and hope I had then. I want to tell her everything will be alright. Strange, unexpected, disappointing at times, but alright, even in the darkness when she can’t see. Her faith in the light and dark will grow stronger as will her belief that she can survive. I want to tell her one day I will be brave enough to write from my heart and share it aloud.

I also want to tell her to cherish every minute. She knew that somehow. I don’t know how. Maybe because she knew she was just passing through.

A microcosm of a lifetime.

[I have been asking myself lately: what would I want to tell myself today, thirty years from now? How will I see today from then?]

It was a time of so many firsts. Natural beginner’s mind. I remember sheer elation ripping through me, just walking around by myself. Getting caught in the rain. Saying hello as we passed one another, all of us on our way somewhere and then finding each other in late evenings in stately clubhouses on loan to us. I also remember the crush of my first broken heart. The loneliness of being misunderstood. And managing the workload. The work-hard, play-hard ethic. Above all, there was something about just being there, in the holding tank of the past, the future and the infinite possible.

Working at Talbots across the street from campus, I had a town life as well as a gown one. I made friends with women who lived locally. Over the years, two of them let me store my things in their basements during the summer. Approaching campus recently, I drove by one of them. I stopped at a tag-sale and parked in the town lot.

I was back.

In those hours a few Saturdays ago, I was not a mom trying to understand our current mission. I was not a divorced wife with a real understanding of heartbreak and consequence. I was not even middle aged. In that moment, walking Nassau Street, I was just myself. Pure and simple. A joy-driven, timeless being.

*

A few years ago when we were living in Brooklyn, I had a car garaged not far from our apartment, and I could drive to campus. As soon as I was out of the city and on the NJ Turnpike, approaching and then passing Newark airport, it was like my parents hitched a spirit ride. Memories flooded. Picking them up. Big hugs. Wide smiles. My pride. Theirs. Sharing this invisible, elusive bridge between my life and theirs.

I was driving Dad’s old GMC Jimmy with its distinct smell of stale water and sun-baked vinyl, a two door with the passenger side that bent and slid forward to make just enough space to climb in, lambskin seat covers, and hubs that required you to get out and turn a dial for four wheel drive.

I loved picking up my parents at the airport and showing them my collegiate life. All of us still untarnished, polished by a love melded through absence.

As I drove south with my spirit hitchhikers, I remember feeling like it was the 1990s and they were still alive, beside me, about to see—truly see—me, and my life.

By the time I neared campus, this recollection returned to its formless form, and I wove more into the ceaselessly-past-infused present. By Prospect Street and the sociology department and the library. My well-trodden paths.

*

Maybe it is the aliveness of the past that makes me feel so alive in the present here. So many other places I have lived no longer “house” me. I visit them as an outsider who once lived there, and I am grateful for the freedom of the road to take me there. But here on campus, there is a magical sense of still being an insider. Still calling this home. Still belonging to something.

Yet there are areas where it has changed beyond recognition. I travel through these parts, detached. This is where there were open fields. This is where I walked home. This is where there were tennis courts. This is where there was a hill. I used to sit here and think. This is where there was once a sign that said Goodbye President Bowen.

It is alright. I still have enough here that I recognize. This is a gift of the senses. A gift to my spirit. I am alive here no matter what. No matter how I fail in relationships. No matter how much money is in the bank. No matter how confused I am about where I fit in the world. No matter what. My soul seems to know this. This is where I just am.

*

I saw my friend. We walked and talked like we always do, dropping into our enduring space and its truths, its questions. We found other classmates who came to walk the route, and we met new people. This is another reunions jewel: continuing to meet people who shared these four years whom we have never met. Despite there being only about twenty intrepid folk from 1991 and many more cicadas doing our 30^th walk down the heart of campus, I discovered—as I always seem to—someone who stood out from the crowd, and I wonder how I missed her all of these years.

When our renegade p-rade ended, we were met by a smattering of alums of all ages with a sense of child-like delight, proud of ourselves for holding up tradition in spite of circumstance.

Then we returned to our dyad for a necessary trip to the U-Store, and a drive to the train station for my friend’s return to her busy city life.

*

My next stop was an overnight stay with one of these reunions jewels, a friend I got to know during the planning of our 25^th. As undergrads, we knew each other’s faces, said hello in passing, shared people in common. But five years ago, we started a friendship that continues to grow. Staying at her farm made a super-charged day into a restorative retreat.

The next morning I was back on the road, all points west across the great state of Pennsylvania. As it turns out, our Ohio project is about as close to the PA/OH line as school is to the PA/NJ line. It’s just that Pennsylvania is no small state.

*

As I drove away from campus, from this land I have known for almost thirty-five years— 65% of my life and counting—I had this strange book-end to the spirit hitch-hikers of the northern roads, where my parents (now absent twenty-seven and seven years) were momentarily alive and well.

I was moved with a fresh awareness that these familiar places will continue exist long after me, likely long after all of us in the classes of 1990 and 1991. I may be a spirit hitchhiker for G or someone else one day. The spaces I adored so much partly because they were inhabited by historic figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald will continue to inspire countless others—some of them dreamers like me—making them feel invited to return and giving them that same sense of belonging.

*

After getting up at 5AM on Saturday morning and getting back to the Ohio apartment about 7PM on Sunday, I was a-swirl in emotion by the time I walked into my room. Here, over the past year of temporary living, I have built an altar. A place of prayer, hope, desperation, regeneration, inspiration, even play. Crystals, photographs, candles, figurines, incense, essential oils. A jar of fairy lights. Found feathers. Two goddesses. Two whales. Two bears. One lion with wings. Angel cards. Angelite. Rose quartz. Some other tokens.

Among the photographs are images that represent my children, my best self, the pets who have nourished my spirit. There is an image of my parents and me at twenty-one. At graduation. Which means that my happy place is also represented on my altar.

Often I find myself on my knees just being present with these elements. Nothing lofty. Just being. Keeping the pieces moving and active. A form of quieting the mind, I suppose. Of being in the moment, for a moment. Sometimes I gather a thought while I am there, just as often I do not. Sometimes I arrive with a thought, to deliver it to other realms.

In my exhaustion and reflection, I needed somewhere to anchor this vast sense of what it meant for me to get the opportunity to go to our university. How in many ways it is the cornerstone of my sense of accomplishment in this life, especially since so much of what I have done has no measure. And how it is connected to countless ongoing dividends, especially in friendship.

Looking at the photograph again of my mother, father and me not far in age from G today, I not only see, I feel their role in making it possible. All of the steps, all of their choices and disagreements, sacrifices and extra efforts, support and confidence, encouragement and surrender. Letting me go, sometimes even pushing me to go. Every step from the first to the last.

And I know: my education is their greatest gift. I also know it is so much more than books and lectures and professors. It is a whole world, still unfolding today in tangible and intangible ways.

I whisper thank you thank you thank you across the veil and hope that they hear.

In honor of their upcoming 65^th angel wedding anniversary
And another gift they gave to me: staying together.