That's All That I Want

While running into the Juliet Café yesterday to meet a friend, I slammed into a planter and cracked the display of my cell phone. Without a watch, I no longer have any means of checking the time while on the go. This seemed appropriate to the occasion, as time ceased to have any meaning about halfway through the weekend.

One weekend, eh? Can't be enough. I hadn't seen many of the people there in years (some of them for one to three years, others for a full five), and a conversation of a few minutes just can't be enough to make those years go away. Brief reunions that aren't going to lead to permanent reconciliation are momentarily exquisite and sharply painful days later, as faces and voices twinkle in your mind and evoke the life you once led, the life you could have led, and the life you're never going to lead.

There's more pain than that. I loved Vassar--continue to love it, very deeply--and it still has the capacity to make me a bit miserable. Everything about Vassar stresses how much faith the college has in its students, what lengths it feels it appropriate to go to to make them happy and urge them on to success. And I never felt entirely worthy of that in terms of intelligence, diligence, proactiveness or even (my god) attractiveness, as though I had snuck in the back door and never been noticed. That feeling was back in full force at reunion. I joked a few times over the weekend about hoping to get lucky, and I knew it wasn't going to happen. Not that it was a huge priority, and not that there were even more than a couple of (pretty laughable) candidates, but I knew it. Any progress I'd made building myself up in my head was gone, and I was the sore thumb.

And let's face it: we're old. After a few hours of drinking at an open bar, we were falling asleep in our town house instead of going wild. Nap's turned out to be closed for the off-season, and instead of deciding on a substitute for its California Chicken subs, we babbled a little more and went to bed.

So it was a time of mixed emotions, a thrilling, exciting three days tinged with regret for the way it was and was not, the way it will and will not be. I wasted a lot of my time there wanting things that I could have had had I just played some bits a little differently.

It was a thrilling, exciting three days. Let's leave it at that and get to the highlights:

*The gay couple who's been together since freshman year even though one is at least three times cuter than the other. That's love.

*My former co-worker, who recounted with gusto the tale of her marriage to another of our co-workers, her discovery of his affair with a woman dating back to their Vassar days, the ensuing confrontations, and their ultimate divorce. A horror story but for the hilarity she obviously found in it, and for how she shortly afterwards succeeded where I failed this weekend, if you catch my drift.

*The tons of men who have not aged as well as I have, with bald spots and love handles in ample evidence. (Granted, both can be kinda hot, but I still feel a little wicked thrill for having avoided them.)

*The fact that nearly everyone I know showed up with a spouse, fiancé or significant other of some kind in tow. And that they were without exception very sweet and charming people I hope to spend more time with in the future--in five years if not sooner.

*The absence of some people I'd kind of like to see but whose presence would have caused unnecessary friction.

*Lunch at the Culinary Institute. Late-night pizza from Nap's (on one early night, anyway). A quick bite at a place everybody else apparently frequented all the time. A beer at the Juliet and another at the Mug.

*Campus housing: thin sheets and blankets, tiny pillows, disgusting stained carpeting and people partying outside the windows at all hours. I'm young again.

*All of the fabulous new construction projects--the new Terrace Apartments built into the hillside, the incredible Center for Stage and Film built behind the facade of the demolished Avery Hall, the library addition that wraps around the original addition and hides the ugly thing from view, and the intriguing gutting of Jewett to make every floor easy to get to (and ADA-compliant, for that matter).

*Rain. All day Saturday. Enough that the air on Sunday was full of the rich Hudson Valley scent of earth and grass and trees and water and things that I have only liked being exposed to at one time in my life.

I want to be ten years older. Or ten years younger. Or ten.