Knucklehead Days
Physicists probing the space-time continuum
would do well to pull their gaze from the heavens, stash the telescopes,
and take a stroll across their old college campuses. In the place where
you come of age, time holds more wrinkles than a linen suit after a long
commute. Past and present jostle each other like impatient preschoolers.
Like many people in Massachusetts, I experience a fair amount of past/present
jostling. I live near my alma mater.
I've been accused of sentimentality, but it's hard to avoid nostalgia when
your past is only 10 miles down the road. My old school looks particularly
fine in early evening, when lights twinkle from skyscrapers rising against
slate-blue hills. It is a city of enchantment, a land of good books and
kindred spirits and a multiplicity of causes ranging from freedom of speech
to freedom for the bound periodicals.
"There's UMass," I say to my husband, who invariably rolls his
eyes. Putting the past in its place is easy for him. He went to a tiny
limestone college in Pennsylvania. The place where he loved and lost, read
and wrote, stayed up late and acted like a knucklehead, is a seven-hour
drive and two major cities away. I was a knucklehead right here.
I didn't stay. There were three years in the city before I returned for
graduate school, accompanied by a husband of two weeks. Then came a blur:
thebabythejobthehouse. By the time I had a chance to look up, I'd discovered
a fondness for living where it's quiet and green, a place where my kids
know what a cow looks like not from picture-books but because we live near
farmland.
Sometimes I take the baby - the second one - for walks on campus, because
there's a duck pond and lots of pathways. We stop to buy her an ice cream.
The young man at the Newman Center - I think of him as a young man - laughs
when I tell him that the Newman used to sell beer.
"That must have been a long time ago, ma'am," he says.
Ma'am? Not that long ago.
Pushing the stroller across campus, I think I see classmates and college
friends. I'm on the verge of calling out when reality strikes: one friend
is near Chicago, another in San Francisco, a third in Washington, D.C.
They don't wear bluejeans on weekdays. I think I'm surrounded by ghosts,
but my classmates are gone and I'm still here haunting the place, so maybe
that makes me the ghost.
The time-warp is so pronounced that a clerk at the university store handed
a check back to me one day last spring, saying the date was incorrect.
"It's 1996, not 1986, ma'am."
Then things got even more peculiar. I got a job on campus. Now I dress
up and attend meetings with people I used to protest against. Either they
don't recognize me or they're being very gracious, and I'm certainly not
going ask which.
I see the campus now through two lenses: the lens that sees what was here
when I was a student, the lens that sees what's here today. In my mind's
eye, the Mullins Center is a playing field, and the Amherst Cinema still
shows eclectic double-features. A small corner of my heart believes that
my Orchard Hill friends are nearby; that I'll see Mark or Tony or Sarah
on their way to class. In bluejeans.
Near the dorms, I automatically glance toward my old room to see if my
roommate's home. Except that last I heard her home was in Cleveland. And
that was five years ago. Whether the light is on or not, she's not there.
The baby and I reach the pond. I swear I see myself walking by, a dozen
years younger, in shorter hair and a favorite flannel shirt. She's got
a knapsack slung over her shoulder. I carry a diaper bag and a sack of
stale bread to feed the ducks. We still have a few things in common: we
both carry the newspaper and a coffee.
I smile at her. She is preoccupied; in a hurry to get to class, to finish
a term paper, to graduate and go. She doesn't see my smile. She shifts
her knapsack, sips her coffee. I sip mine. She walks by without recognizing
me.
-Elizabeth Luciano '86, '92G
