Good ol' college days

College life, for most of us, is a unique experience.  It has only a vague resemblance to our K-12 school days.  It bears virtually no resemblance to post-college life.  

College is stressful.  We may be unhappy.  We may grieve the loss of our childhood.  We may feel panicked about our future.  But, regardless of how we felt at the time, we look back on it afterwards with nostalgia -- nostalgia sometimes bordering on the pathological.

At least, that's how two guys, a couple of years out of college, look back on it in a novel I've been reading.¹  They'd been roommates for a year and good friends, but had been out of touch since graduation.  Seeing each other again, they can't stop talking about their college days.  They actually visit their alma mater together, and bribe a student for permission to enter their old dorm and inspect their old dorm room, now occupied by two girls.  The students they encounter, the present occupants of the dormitory,  seem to them to be living in a prelapsarian paradise, a paradise they won't appreciate until driven out into the "real world."

How did they feel about life after leaving college?  "It's the void, ....The post-college void."

There was rarely anything glorious about college, but it was me.  And it filled every single second with ready-made life.  At the tips of my fingers, on the other side of my door, all around me, whenever I wanted it.  In college I could breathe deep and say, This is where I belong.  Even when it was bad.  And even when it was confusing, it made sense.         

What hurt most was that I rushed through it, took it for granted.  I was anxious to graduate, eager to mark the goodbye and move on to something else, to escape and to start over again.  But I'd never felt quite right afterward.

No, I was not stuck in my glory days.  I was homesick.

These two young men were obviously and unhealthily fixated on the past, as the novel continually makes clear.  But I understood them.  And I envied their having met up again, each of them eager to reminisce about their college days.

I hasten to assure my readers that I'm not pathologically "homesick" for my life as an undergraduate.  But the feelings these guys experienced resonate with me.  

I come from a family of folks who love to reminisce.  When we get together, we can sit around for hours talking about the minutiae of our childhoods.  But when it comes to college life, I no longer know anyone to talk with, no one similar to the two young nostalgia-buffs in the novel.

The only college friends with whom I'm still in contact are a couple of twin brothers, both close college friends of mine, and one of whom lived on the same floor of the dorm that I did.  So -- talk over olden times with them, you suggest?  Unfortunately, I've rarely met two people less interested in recalling the past.  In fact, I'm not sure they even remember our college days.  I should have been warned while still in college -- I once talked to my dormmate about junior high, and asked a question about what he thought of his teachers during those years.  He looked at me blankly, and told me he had no idea who his junior high teachers had been.  He seemed to find it odd that I myself still remembered the names of anyone who had taught me in the distant past, some seven or eight years earlier.

What an unfortunate accident that my closest friend from college and I turned out to lie on completely opposite tails of the nostalgia bell curve.

I remembered too how we gave each other haircuts here. And that this was where we had our Secret Santa party that Christmas. Gia threw up in the corner and the weird kid Brian used to lean in that doorway when everyone else filled up the couches.
This was where we were roommates.

Ah yes, good times.  My own memories were, perhaps, more quiet and less typically undergrad.  Or maybe not, when I think back.  I like to recall political and philosophical arguments we had, crowded into someone's room at 1 a.m., or gathered in the common room.  But I also remember that it wasn't until several years after graduation that I could tolerate again the smell and taste of gin.

I suppose it's just as well that I know of no one who can -- or wants to -- either confirm or rebut my memories, or who insists on adding unwanted details.  I'm free to shape my past just as I choose.  But, even though some of the memories that came to light might be embarrassing, I do miss knowing at least one person who shares my memories of those years between 18 and 22.  

I guess I should have caved in earlier and actually attended a class reunion!    

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¹Ben Monopoli, The Cranberry Hush: A Novel  (2011)