My Response to College

I haven’t seen my college in over fifteen years. It was strange to see it again. It looked small and empty. Well, it was empty because it was Spring Break.

I do not think you realize how young you are when you go away to school. You think you’re pretty damn mature. But you’re not. You do wild things. You have wacked sex. You smoke too many cigarettes. You compete with your vocabulary (at least I did).

So there I was on campus on Monday---and since I have not had the emotional memory reinforcement that happens when you see a place quite often, I felt pretty open and almost blank. I had specific fact memories, like, “That building is new…that’s where they used to sell the used records…oh, I lived in that dorm freshman year…” But I did not have any big feelings come up, nothing super cozy. I just felt the general feeling of what it was like to be very young and to be very open to anything that life had to offer. It was a positive feeling. I think, overall, I have a positive feeling about Tufts because I was wide open and it was a place where that was encouraged. A good thing, a liberal arts education. But if I had to do it over again? I would have gone to a larger school in the middle of some giant city. By the time I did the junior year in Paris thing, I was completely ready to blow out of that Boston suburb. It was a romantic time. It was exciting. I moved to New York—went back to Boston to visit a couple of times but really, you just gotta keep moving. You need the new.

Which brings me to my hair. My thinning graying hair. I just had to shave it off tonight.