Gaudy without me

Well. I've tried, but failed, to talk myself into going to my upcoming college reunion. Twenty-five years! Boy, that went fast. When the event was safely in the faraway future, I'd always assumed I'd go, but the recent steady trickle of postcards, letters and e-mails encouraging me to Be There! And Give Money! just fills me with dread. The sociophobe in me imagines three days of cocktail party, trapped with strangers of former acquaintance, cobbling together small talk with feigned interest (or not-so-feigned uninterest). Could I take the tack of showing up not to commune but merely to observe with a distanced reportorial (or bloggertorial) eye? Nah, I ain't that sophisticated. No doubt it'll be a lovely time for those who want to be there. But I'm convinced that the first thing I'd want to do would be to escape to a dimly lit room, out of earshot of all well-met hail-fellows, perhaps to find others there, each similarly ambivalent, studiously avoiding eye contact, and armed with an appropriately esoteric tome as accessory and companion.

Pre-traumatic stress disorder aside, I've been prompted to reread Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, and to revisit Harriet Vane's own reluctant (but vastly more dramatic and literary) journey back to her college:

The iron hand of the past gripping at one's entrails. The college gates; and now one must go through with it.
....

She saw a stone quadrangle, built by a modern architect in a style neither new nor old, but stretching out reconciling hands to past and present.
....

She had never gone back; at first, because she had loved the place too well, and a clean break seemed better than a slow wrenching-away...
....

She filled up her invitation form, addressed it, stamped it with a sharp thump and ran quickly down to drop it in the pillar-box before she changed her mind. [Of course, Harriet has to do this in order to propel the plot of the mystery that will finally unite her with the ultimate Imaginary Guy, Lord Peter Wimsey.]

This quarter-century mark is worth commemorating in some way, even if the official celebration isn't quite for me. Maybe a family trip over spring break, coinciding nicely with the actual twenty-fifth anniversary of the Winter Convocation of 1980. In between the tales to tell and sights to see, I'll want to take leave for a long solitary walk, accompanied only by the ghosts of memories, past the coffeehouses and the bookstores, and through the quads. With any luck, the air will be suffused with fog, and filled with the sound of change-ringing from the tower modeled after Magdalen.

Comments

[bill]

I couldn't go to mine either.
It would be interesting to see whatever came of some of them. I wish someone had gone and filmed it.

[Kathy]

The college I went to was big enough that I would have no assurance that anyone I knew would also be there, or if there, that I would find them in the throng. I figure if you've lost touch after all these years, there must be a reason for it.

[Don]

I missed my 25th a few years ago. My theory that helped me rationalize not going was that there is a reason one has not kept up with those folk all these years.

That said, as I am getting older, I also realize that I've easily let some friendships disappear, particularly from those years.

[Ann]

My 25th college reunion was a long time ago, but I was never tempted to attend. I would have preferred to go to the college where I began my college career and stayed for 2 1/2 years. It was smaller and I was more involved in campus activities than the large university where I graduated. Why don't they have reunions for freshmen classes? (Don't know if I'd attend that either, but it would be much more interesting and include people for whom college was not the only path.)

I saw the alumni roster for both schools and knew many more in the small college--interestingly enough, few females listed occupations outside the home, even some of the bright stars.

Ann