My wife and I once participated in a 10k run at the last of the five universities I attended to get my BA. It was the first time I visited the campus with her, and I felt nostalgic.
"There was a giant, wall-sized photograph of the entire United States in that building," I told her, (forgetting that that satellite images of the entire Earth can now be summoned on any phone).
But as we marched along I realized how different my nostalgia was from the memories of those around me. Hundreds of alumni were converging to participate in the race. Many wore school colors. They were laughing and talking with lifelong college chums or a person they met on campus and later married. They were remembering frat parties, dances, football games, sex in the dormitories, wild times on and off campus.
Me? My fondest memory was giant, black and white composite photograph of the United States.
I loved my college years, but they were different. I spent my college years alone. I explored the libraries and bookstores. I went to plays and movies. I visited art museums and galleries. I read. I listened to music. I taught myself guitar. I wrote. I went to class. I worked. I went home--early on to a dorm room, and later to apartments, where I saw no one and received no visitors.
I suppose I shouldn't exaggerate. I made one good friend during my freshman year. And on a year abroad program I got to know the names and faces of a hundred fellow students but at two other schools I attended I never met or talked to a soul for more than a few minutes.
I was undiagnosed autistic. School was easy. The social life was impossible.
In those days I wrote lots of letters to my family and to my high school friend, Greg. In those letters I described the people around me as dummies and snobs. I tried to be funny about it, but my bitterness was palpable. I had no explanation for why I found myself alone in large groups of happy people.
There's no way for me to mend relations with people at four of my five colleges because I never learned their names. But for a decade now I've been attending reunions of the year abroad program that I attended in the mid-1970s.
The year abroad program was different. It was a small group. We flew abroad together. We travelled together. We studied together. We lived together in small rooming houses. A lot of us drank together. I wrote about the experience HERE. In some ways I knew those people like the back of my hand. I knew their names and faces, the way they talked and laughed.
But I didn't actually know them, and they didn't know me. They saw me as inexplicably quiet (except in my own rooming house, where I was inexplicably loud.) I tried for a while to fit in, and to some extent tried to join in, but without much success. For the most part I simply observed.
When I began to attend the reunions, forty years later, I inherited a batch of photographs taken by others. I only appear in a handful, accidentally, and off to the side. Once, looking at them, I teared up.
It's been interesting to meet the other students forty and fifty years later, now that I have the skills to interact properly. I feel like I've met many of them for the first time. They are interesting people, with interesting lives. (Our year abroad was undoubtedly a factor; most of us have continued to travel and explore throughout our now long lives.)
I wish it had been easier to get to know each other then.
I'm glad it's possible now.
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