Alumni seem out of place

Jackie May, staff writer

Shouldering my way through drifts of alumni at the Homecoming parade this weekend, I was hit with a realization: You can’t go home again. (I didn’t say it was an earth-shattering realization, all right?)

I think many of us first figured this out a month or two into our freshman year, when we went home for the first time, dropped by a high school football game or choir concert or Homecoming coronation and were profoundly disappointed.

I remember a vague hope that I’d be greeted with shrieks of delight befitting a weary and sophisticated traveler who’d dodged kegs and flaming arrows to escape the Land of College. Instead, I had several short but awkward conversations (“So, how’s college?” “Good. How’s high school?” “Good.” “Ready to graduate?” “Uh-huh.”), looked for people from my class and didn’t find them and retreated to my parents’ house.

So I felt a little sorry for the alumni this weekend. It must be the strangest feeling to return, not just to your school but to your city, and not belong.

Everyone is young, bubbling, idealistic-looking. No one drives a Suburban, and when you were last here, you didn’t either. You biked everywhere and all your pants had snags on the right cuff from catching in the chain. You washed dishes every three weeks, pans twice a semester. Rent and beer held equal sway over your checking account.

And then the city has changed, too; more chain restaurants on State Street, Club Amazon in place of Bullwinkle’s, that huge construction project. Suddenly you’re an island of responsibility in the Badger sea, an alien visitor to a Madison that isn’t the one you left.

I’m exaggerating, of course. A few new restaurants don’t equate to Bizarro World, and with alumni choking the sidewalks, they couldn’t possibly feel like any kind of island. The ones I saw this weekend seemed to be having fun: yelling obscene things, misplacing their hotels, shoving each other in foosball-related disputes, aggressively befriending the Bacardi girls. In other words, acting like us, except for the hotels. But they still didn’t belong.

This isn’t a bad thing. Alumni probably look at us with a sort of wistful contempt. We have hangovers, they have mortgages. They guide the physical and emotional development of their children, we kill our cacti. They’ve moved on. (So I should have been flattered, not deeply alarmed, when a girl mistook my friend and me for married alumni from out of town, right?)

You can’t go back to earlier versions of yourself. The worlds change, and you change, and other people come in to take your place and learn the things you learned while you were there. Even if your old spot was still open, you wouldn’t fit in it. It would be like trying to do a puzzle after all the pieces have spontaneously sprouted extra knobs.

In two years, when I’m using my creative-writing degree on “Will Work For Food” signs, or breeding out of sheer ennui, someone else will be writing cynical columns fueled by sleep deprivation and Oreos, and that’s as it should be. And I’ll come back during Homecoming weekend, possibly to beg my old classmates for money, and I won’t belong.

But the whole point of no longer belonging in one place is that it probably means you belong somewhere else, somewhere with possibilities the old place no longer had.

This doesn’t work in all cases, of course; people coming home from gulags probably feel a tad disoriented, but that doesn’t mean they should go get themselves recaptured.

But in general, if a return means feeling out of place, it’s a sign of progress. I wouldn’t go back to high school for anything.

Well, unless I could use the knowledge I have now to avoid mistakes I made in the past. Come to think of it, much of what I’ve learned has been directly due to those mistakes, so it’s one of those go-back-in-time-and-kill-your-grandfather conundrums. But I digress.

Watching alumni this weekend, I wasn’t sure what the point of Homecoming was. Unless they were too drunk to stand up, they seemed self-conscious and out-of-place, and who likes feeling out of place? But maybe that is the point: not to visit your old haunts and be your younger self for a while, but to discover how far you’ve come.

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.