Tuesday, June 16, 2015

This Weekend We // Alumni Weekend

I really want to find all the words I'm looking for, the one's that explain how special this place is, how special the people I met there are, what it's like to get to return there year after year, with more and more of my own children in tow.

The weekend makes me feel. Feel everything. All at once. With every inch. It leaves me nearly empty at the end.  I spend forty-eight hours wanting to be everywhere, with everyone, all the time. And I simultaneously want to be with every single person, one on one, alone, somewhere quiet over looking the water, reminiscing, catching up.

If you didn't go to St. Mary's and you're around St. Mary's people, it would be easy to find us pretty insufferable. We are all so damn pleased with ourselves for having gone there, for having found each other.

I have become increasingly disillusioned with the concept of college; as it turns out, a college degree doesn't mean as much as people told me it would. I feel like my generation and the ones coming up behind us were sold a bill of goods. And yet, I would never want my own children to miss out on what college can be. Those years practicing being an adult in the most contrived ways while discussing politics and poetry and art and philosophy with trippy music playing in the background. Best done along the banks of a river surrounded by brick buildings.

Those years meant a lot to me. They meant a lot to a lot of people. We needed them. Need them still. They continue to influence us and to shape us, even after nearly a dozen years since we were in those classrooms.

1 comment:

  1. That's a lot of relaxed looking happiness ... even if there are mixed feelings woven through.

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