Homecoming

This weekend was my five year... OK, my fifteen year... college reunion. Honestly, I feel like I just graduated 5 years ago. I know it's such a cliche, but it seems like just yesterday. Oh, don't get me wrong, I feel old. And there's definitely been a lot of proverbial water under the proverbial bridge since leaving Ithaca College in 1993. Little things like marriages and divorces and death and kids. It's just that emotionally and maturity-wise, I feel like I'm just out of college. I feel like the other parents I see are, like, grown-up, experienced parents, and Pete and I are poser parents; two people just kind of playing house and impersonating real adults.

I am the queen of nostalgia. In this regard, Pete and I are completely different. Pete lives in the here and now; he doesn't have a sentimental bone in his body. When his mom sold the family home of 20 some-odd-years, Pete said good riddance. Then there's me. We moved from my childhood home when I was in 10th grade and I still haven't gotten over it. It drives Pete crazy. Every time we go home (see- I still refer to the town I grew up in as home, even though I have lived in Massachusetts for the last 14 years) I want to drive through good ol' Robinhood Court, where Pete jokes that I had the world's most enchanted childhood of pine needle fort building and endless games of "pretend", and playing with my doll house and kitchen set way longer than I should have been (like in junior high). And whenever we drive though I lament about how much it has all changed and how you just can never go back. How the tree fort is now in someones back yard instead of buried deep in the woods, and how the pond is really nothing more than a puddle now (maybe that's all it ever was?) And how I don't approve of how many trees have been cut down, or that the "circle" (cul de sac) is now paved and has houses all the way around it. And how someday I'm going to buy my house back. Along with my grandparent's camp.

I just have such a hard time letting go. I want to keep the essence of everyone I've ever known (well, maybe just the good ones) and every place I've ever been in a little jar that I can take with me and open up whenever I want and relive everything down to the most minute detail (kind of like the penseive in Harry Potter). To me, that's what heaven will be. You get to go back and do all the best stuff again, and see all the people you knew, to go back to your old bedroom and pet your old dog and play "Star Wars" with your best friends until it gets dark and the fireflies come out and the parents start calling everyone home one by one.

I did have a really great childhood (except for high school, which I hold few fond memories of because, as you can probably surmise, I was a dork. And dorks just don't have a good time in high school.) My college years were even better. When I began in the fall of '89 I was a sheltered, naive, small town girl with a boyfriend back home and two best friends who I had known since I was five years old. I spent the first semester calling and writing home and just being homesick. But somewhere during those four years I changed. Things ended with the hometown boyfriend and I began to enjoy college life and being away from home. I found myself a core group of friends and those four years became some of the best in my life.

Going back to Ithaca always kicks my sentimental mode into overdrive. The drive there, with all the familiar landmarks I had forgotten about until I saw them again, the music of my college years, which I subjected my family to the entire way, the approach into town with the great view of the whole campus perched on the hill, and especially the campus itself (although, much like Robinhood Court, a lot has changed which of course bummed me out). It flooded me with memories and made me burst with excitement yet want to cry at the same time.

It was so great to see my "peeps" again. In college, much like in high school, I didn't have a ton of friends. But the friends that I did have were close ones. The gang was a few of us girls from school (Ithachicks) and a couple of misfit guys from Cornell, the neighboring school, along with some of their friends from Syracuse. It was a time of drinking and singing and grab-assing and frolicking (we actually called it that) and compiling a list of funny quotes, usually conceived while drinking, and then reusing those quotes ad nauseum and one upping each other with one liners and affectionate insults. I was "Red", one of the guys, able to hold her own with the best of them. Those friends helped shape who I am today. They gave me confidence and a sense of belonging.

After college, despite our best intentions, we drifted apart. We did pretty well at first. We got a place on the Cape for a week the first few summers and did some camping trips. And of course there were all the weddings. But we're spread out over four states and soon the kids started coming and it got harder to travel, harder to spare the limited vacation time from real jobs. They all attended, or were in, my wedding six years ago, and we did manage to come together for the ten year reunion, but then we all became incommunicado for the next five years. I'm so glad that we all managed to pull it together for this reunion, and while I won't say that nothing has changed, I still felt the same connection. And now there's the added bonus of seeing every one's kids. What a mind scrambler that is. It's so amazing to watch my friends, that irresponsible, immature bunch of misfits that we were, now being parents, and doing a pretty good job of it. What a great bunch of kids we've managed to create, and how very much like their parents they are in so many wonderful ways.

We all vowed to do a better job staying in touch from now on, and this blog is, in part, my commitment to do just that. We're planning to get together again in a year, maybe meeting somewhere in the middle for a long weekend, and I will personally make sure that happens because this group of people, for all that they are and all that they represent, mean the world to me.

The Ithachicks

The Ithakids

The Gang (most of them)

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There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed;
Some forever not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

"In my Life"- The Beatles