When they told me at the airport desk that I was flying standby because I had no seat reservations, I knew I’d be writing about going back to Oberlin. It’s been so long since I blogged that they’ve entirely changed the WordPress layout, which, by the way, looks really good. But sometimes you just have something to say, or far to much to say, and you realize that even though your last post, from two months ago, was about how long it had been since you wrote, it’s time.
I got on that plane on Thursday night, flew to Vegas, and Chicago, and finally Cleveland, where I begged my way back to Oberlin. We drove in pretty quietly, everyone on the airport van watching the landscape for change, trying to remember what had been there last time we came that way. Finally, past the Farm, we arrived.
Getting back was like inhabiting a memory. In my mind, the place had become more real than the actual, alive Oberlin. I knew where everything was (with some notable exceptions, like the A-level remodel), remembered everything, but it all just looked a little flat. Maybe that was in part due to the fact that when I arrived, the town was still quiet. Friday was a day of arrivals, and after I found Sam at his gas station and put down my bags at his house, I returned to Tappan to collect people.
This clumping was something I hadn’t quite experienced as a freshman, coming in for preseason and missing out on that first week of orientation friend-finding. It’s a thrill to have a posse, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed adhering first to Melissa, and then to Tina, Phoebe, and Henry. In the Feve by around 3, it just felt so good to be back. The whirlwind started.
The dance party at the Sco, the dance parties/porch sits at 189, the alumni game, the trip to Chance Creek, breakfast at the Black River, stumbling into the Swing Dance, schmoozing at the art show, visiting the AJLC to use the facilities, showering, drinks at the Feve, the front lawn of Tank, softball at the Pleasant street park, the Bippy show, weirdly, partying in South, buying a sticker at the bookstore and a postcard at Ben Franklin: all over the place, reuniting. Sleep a little, do a lot. Miss even more.
Revealed (or rerevealed) to me:
- I want to do everything I ever find interesting, and am frustrated at the impossibility of that desire.
- I know a lot of fantastic people doing amazing things, and am frustrated that I do not
- know them better
- keep in touch with them more frequently
- There is a script for the reunion meeting that is a little sad and progressively harder to overcome the more you use it. Phrases often repeated:
- Where are you now?
- I’m in grad school/I’m going to grad school/I’m working in this amazing environmental job/I’m getting married
- I know you look familiar, but I can’t remember what context I knew you in
- Meet at the Feve tonight
- Do you know where Hans is? (a representative example)
- When did you get in?
- What’s going on tonight?
- and my repeated conversations – about Eugene: how close it is to everything, how it took me a while to like it but I do now, how it’s not as rigorous as I like but you just have to make it what you want, how if you’re ever on the west coast you should visit me/I should visit you – about Oberlin: how much it feels like this weird memory that I’m inhabiting, how I’m in sensory overload, how when I was there I could deal with a lot more going on all at once but since I’ve left I no longer can be in that close proximity with that many people and be comfortable and happy, how the people even if you didn’t know them that well just feel like the kind of people you want to be with, how everyone is doing such interesting things, how I feel kind of dorky taking pictures of the buildings but I feel like I need to because they come up in my architecture classes – about the reunion: how so many people are here!, how certain particular people are not here, how amazing it is to be here, how it’s not actually my reunion but I knew that I couldn’t come next year and maybe not for some years after that and this was the last year I knew anyone graduating and plus the people in this cluster (02-04) were the people that were there when I was a freshman and I felt close to them maybe even more so than my own cluster.
- Oberlin is beautiful, especially in the spring. The people there are pretty amazing, and really are different from the general population of the US.
So, a mostly wonderful experience. Even the hard parts, the not getting enough of the people I wanted to see and soak up, the occasional awkwardnesses and left-out feelings, the being excited when you’re so sleep deprived that you want to cry, even those were pretty good. Maybe the hardest part, scheduling my plane so that I couldn’t find a ride to the airport and had to spend a lot of valuable party time asking people to borrow a car and then leaving straight from a dance party and not getting to really hug people and say goodbye – maybe even that was pretty good.
When can I go back?