University Reunion Brings Back Youth and Gratefulness

Madison, Wis. – The blurry black and white picture from so long ago, I am standing on a chair in an A-line skirt with the bunched hem held up by a few pins.

          Decades have passed since that photo, probably from Peg’s instammatic camera. Don’t recall ever even seeing the picture before.  Don’t know who was measuring to make sure that hem was even.  Peg has brought a handful of such photos along to share with the rest of us, back for the first time all together again since graduation in 1965 at our alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Peg and Sue,  I and Shari.  (Shari actually graduated the year before us, but joined us for this 50^th alumni weekend since so much of our life on campus had been spent together).

That picture at our dorm, Slichter Hall.  It records our enthusiasm when we discovered we could make our own A-line skirts. Don’t know where we got the sewing machine but we could have this richness, an entire wardrobe of A-line skirts for so little money, just the cost of material and our own efforts.

The memories flood back. Here we are all together again, only now we all have at least some white hair and wrinkles. Here this blustery fall day for the alumni reunion. I had forgotten how we were back then so long ago.  We were a pack.

And now we were once again.  For one rollicking fall weekend, in the same place where all our hopes and dreams were hatched nearly a lifetime ago.  Somehow, the combination worked its original magic and we were able down the long halls of time, to reach back and touch the girls we had once been.

I get ahead of myself.   Back to the old photos, that one with the skirt.  I am wearing a Norwegian print sweater, machine-made but my pride and joy. Doesn’t go at all with the cotton A-line skirt.  Me with thick darker hair, short and somehow curly before the rest of a lifetime of a bob and straight hair.

More pictures, that was how my hair was curly. A girl with a bonnet hair dryer,  one of the triumvirate of true prizes in the dorms along with a popcorn popper and a typewriter.  No cell phones,  I-pads, laptops or television sets.  We all shared one phone on our floor and you were lucky to have a record player and alarm clock.  I remember the pain, if you didn’t have a hair dryer,  brush rollers poking your head all night long while you tried to sleep.

Like I said, we were a pack. Photos of us everywhere, striking model-like poses next to a tree, girls on the verge of emergence as young women.  Dreamy with so much future ahead of us.

For me, my first time away from home except for a short stint at summer camp. For the first time, I was finding myself without family and all the duties of a much younger brother and working mom and dad. No comparisons like before with an older sister. No nights of babysitting.  The feeling of freedom, all these new friends to make. Both Shari and I had to reform by second semester after our grades suffered from too much socializing.

And now we were back, each of us traveling from afar, me the farthest, the West Coast.   We jump up and down in the hallway at our hotel, the Lowell Center, a former lady’s dorm. Causing a ruckus of noise, squeals of delight at seeing each other after so many years. Sue from Minneapolis, a retired social worker. Shari a ph.d in psychology still working in Pittsburgh. Peg a retired elementary school teacher from a small town near Philadelphia. And me, a retired journalist from Vancouver, Wa.

Excited, we head off to the  main drag, the nearby State Street.  The  first impression, still the same commercial zone of bars and coffee shops and the university bookstore.  But the kids, so young and so many, so concentrated. We order teas and coffee in a shop and sit out in the wind.

The parade of youth before us.  We laugh and laugh at each other’s jokes.  Each recounting their trip here.  The vagaries of plane travel today. Only Sue drove  from her home.  Where the weather is often way worse. I recall a visit eons ago when it was 30 below the morning I left in  my car, worried when the door slammed shut and Sue already off at work. Would my car start?

That was when I told her, “you live in a crapola place.” Innocent words directed not at her home but the climate. It became the catchword among us for the rest of the trip.  That I said she lived in a “crapola place.”

“When I get home, I shall have to send you all pix of my condo,” she says. A cascade of laughter.

The pack is back. We march to Bascom hill, the steep hill that ends in the old center of the campus at  Bascom Hall and the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln. Graduates now take their picture in his lap.  But we only walk around the bottom of the hill, aching hips and backs, the wind so fierce this October day.  We enter an ancient hall with stained glass windows where on fall afternoons each of us at some point listened to chamber music. I can recall the sense of peace it gave, plus the nearly free extra credits.

But this is just the start of the whirlwind weekend that will pass too soon, a time when place and company help bring back a moment’s taste once again of being young, of being so hopeful. A time of nostalgia. A time when we took for granted having friends, having family, all around us. So much of that, especially primary family, now gone.

We realize the preciousness of our group. In the whole wide world, the four of us together are probably the largest concentration of people who remember each other’s mother. We walk past the University club, the UW band playing inside. The music, State Street, the early darkness and wind. We are back.

The next day, the alumni association has a “day of learning”  which they have had to stage at the newer south union, the main one we knew and loved under major renovation. We assemble with the few hundred other alumni to hear from various departments. How music changed since the 60s, how we can try to get enough fuel for the future, how will we feed the 15 billion people the world is expected to have by midcentury. All bemoan the loss of public funding, but say they reach out and will somehow continue through private donations.

Sitting and listening once again to profs.  Sitting together and taking notes.  Afterwards, we walk to Babcock hall, famous for its dairy plant and single ice cream cone that was actually three whole dips. Hey, this is Wisconsin.  We crowd in where there used to be just one lady to a real store with counter and tables. Order up our cones. Still so good, still so big.

Then onward to our old dorm. This side route is much flatter we all note than marching up from the bottom of Bascom Hill.  Steps matter these days though all four of us are dedicated walkers. A rush of wind and we are at Slichter hall. The same square stone faced building. 

A young man opens the door for us.  Like all the youngsters we met, so polite and willing to talk and help.   He tells us boys live now on one side, girls on the other. All girl when we lived there. The students don’t share bathrooms, he says, much to our sigh of relief. We try to remember what floor and room we were in but memory fails. We do remember though how you could get late minutes and campuses and even get thrown out of school for violations. The necking that would go on at the doorway before those last minutes ticked away. And now the boys and girls live in the same building.

Onward to what used to be the Pine room, cherry cokes and blond brownies of our past. Now a reception area. Then Van Hise dining hall, the same dining hall no more.   We all worked there once, amazing that you could pay for your schooling that way instead of today’s massive debts. We all worked the scrape table, pulling off the dishes and leftover food. The starched pink uniforms we had to wear, how we’d sneak the hems up from around our ankles. The required hairnets and the “W’s” on the plate edge we had to position just so. The hall, now something different, wasn’t open to visit.

Then along the lakeside path.  Choppy waves, the blue Lake Mendota. Stories I recall about a mental home on the other side, bodies that might float up. All just stories.  The lake and adjacent woods are beautiful. We all remark, how lucky we had been. This campus, the opportunity our families gave us. Each of us except Peg the first in our families to graduate from university.

Peg, always gentle, her head down as she moves forward in thought just like before. I always felt safe with her. Even when she took me out in one of the little sailboats they still rent out on Lake Mendota down near the main student union.  I’d never sailed before, didn’t know how to help with the sail when the winds changed. I dodged and somehow we made it safely to shore.

 Sue with her analytic mind. Perfect for a social worker, her life’s job. How we would sit on her bed and parse what someone had said and what it might mean. Shari, always practical and moving forward,  she got us going on the A-line skirts.

Saturday the big game.  We get our picture taken with the UW mascot, Bucky Badger. Heck, he is 75 this year.  Grab up some cheerleader pompoms, the characteristic red and white. A mountain goat climb to our seats. Our delight when the student section does this new tradition, jump around and the entire student section, hundreds of kids in the red and white school colors jump up and down. Our old knees allow some wiggle.  The pompoms help. The man in front of us, another alumni, says I am Medicare, uses our shoulder to hold him up as he goes by. We lose the game, a blunder at one yard from goal, but even so we stand with gusto to sing “Varsity,U rah rah Wisconsin” with the characteristic hand wave at the end.

The next day early we all peel off, back to our respective lives. But Sue says it all for us, “Growing old is not easy but having connection with those people with whom you share a past can help ease the pain.”

So much we shared. So great to touch upon it all again. This sense of gratitude for all we had once and still have.