How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold.
~ Frodo, The Return of the King
Eastern Nazarene College of Quincy, Massachusetts is my alma mater. It was my school - my home - for four and a half years thirty years ago.
I was there yesterday for most of the day.
My wife and I drove down for a regional Bible quizzing tournament in which our youngest son was participating.
May has always been a most pleasant time of the year to be on campus. It usually means very fine weather, the buzz of seniors graduating, the silencing of the educational halls so busy during the year - a time for reflection and rejoicing and the simple appreciation of a beautiful environment in full throes of new birth.
The tournament was held after students and graduating seniors had already vacated the school, so the only denizens were the quizzers and their organizers. Even without the normal complement of college co-eds, the campus was alive with activity for a few days as teenagers from Virginia to Maine gathered for this major event of their competitive year.
When we weren't actually observing the competitions, my wife and I walked around the campus and I pointed out various items of interest. It occurs to me that everything I said was meaningless to her, but I dowsed us both in remembered lore and trivia. She was patient.
I kept looking around for familiar faces from my era that would ignite the whole nostalgia launch; maybe Dave and Karen, Frank or Sherrie - I had seen them all at tournaments in previous years. But they were strangely absent this time around. So I took pictures of buildings and landscapes - pictures I had taken before. I guess maybe I thought I needed more of the same.
We ate lunch with Ed and Kelly, both of whom attended ENC a few years after I graduated. In the course of conversation I asked Ed what he thought about being there, and he gave me a knowing smile and made a few comments about how it was sort of strange. I agreed and said that it was foreign, but familiar.
As I walked through the student center later, past the mailboxes, into the Dugout and Fish Bowl, I could hear the sounds of teenagers hanging out and chatting or watching television as they lounged between quiz meets. But I couldn't hear even the faintest of echoes from the past of the activity I knew when I attended ENC no matter how hard I tried to mentally construct it.
The building faces, with few exceptions, are unchanged over the decades, though the interiors may have been remade to someone else's mad design dreams. But where walking back from work late at night usually brought a quickening at first sight of a hummingly lit student center, now there's only a blank stare.
What I once knew as a community alive with creativity and activity, thrills and heartbreak has become cold and sterile, a museum piece to be observed, even touched, but never ever entered into again, at least not wholly. Maybe this sense would be different were the campus fully populated.
I doubt it, though.
I used to own a space of that school, owned it for four and a half years.
But now, after thirty years, I realize that I was really just borrowing that space the entire time I was there, and what I thought I had owned had really owned me. Then it let me go and moved on leaving me to try and figure out what all those threads used to mean.
I know of two more future visits to the school, one for a reunion and the other for my son's last year of quizzing. Then after that, my time there should be totally done as I see no other reason to return.
Not even for memory's sake.
