“This is the last day of our acquaintance”

Sinead O’Connor

I wasn’t going to come. Too many bad memories. But for the first time Canadian Music Week was Monday to Wednesday instead of Thursday to Saturday, so theoretically I could come. So we were on the chairlift and my buddy John put it to me, after a year of discussion, was I going to our Middlebury reunion or not. And I told him only if he picked me up in Toronto and drove me to Vermont. And he said…DONE!

So here I am.

We left T.O. so early, for me anyway, that we encountered traffic in a part of town that I didn’t even know existed. There are all these skyscrapers, north of the city, or maybe it’s east, in the middle of nowhere. I mean you leave the city center and the skyline disappears…and then it reappears! Strange.

And then there was rain. You know, the kind that the windshield wipers can’t keep up with.

But we stayed on the highway to Kingston, and ultimately crossed the St. Lawrence River into the good old U.S.A. and…I was stunned how wide the river was at that point. As for the customs officer…you’d think we were international gunrunners. He looked at our licenses and deeming them insufficient asked us for our passports. So I got out of the car, to get to my computer bag, where said passport resides, I delivered it to the gentleman and then he declared…GET BACK IN THE CAR!

Okay, officer. I retreat and become subservient in the face of authority of this type, John fights back. But he held his tongue, until we got to the tollbooth, whereupon he remarked to the tattooed guy in the hoodie how the border officer was having a bad day…but the guy was too entranced in his boredom to give an adequate reply.

And from there it was surface roads all the way to Middlebury.

And we had lunch in Massena. Not Jim, I saw no Loggins, but after Yelping for the best spot in town, we walked into what turned out to be a bar and the four townies gave us a look like we were in trouble, and there was no food until dinner.

So they sent us to another place just like it, with older regulars at the bar, and I got chicken wings from our server Kim. Who had about as much attitude as the drinkers. But John told her we were going to our reunion, and she started to wax rhapsodic about her high school reunion, how they had five classes and a party and…

The thing about these rural towns is they look so enticing until you actually move there. And then you ask yourself what the hell you’re doing there.

So eventually we cross the bridge over Lake Champlain and we’re approaching the campus and I get wistful. This is my roots, part of my heart is still here, this is Vermont.

Lush, green, beautiful. So different from L.A. I didn’t expect to be so moved, to be so affected.

And then we got to the President’s house for the reception and…

There was no one there.

But she ultimately came out of the house and got into her Ioniq 5 and asked us if we were there for the reception. Yes, and…didn’t we get the e-mail?

NO ONE GOT THE E-MAIL!

This is the difference between business and academia.

Well, the reception had been moved to Ross, because it was going to rain.

Oh, we knew where that was, the SDUs, the “Social Dining Units,” which opened our freshman year. So we drove over there, and what used to be our regular dining place was now the international building.

So that was confusing. But I pulled out my maps app, and Apple, now my guider of choice, said they’d moved Ross…YOU CAN’T DO THAT! You can’t take the name from one building and put it on another, but they did.

And when we drove to the new Ross, looking for a parking spot, we were approached by a nice gray-haired lady who told us she was coming back from the class picture.

Now wait just a minute… That was supposed to be at 6:15. But because of the rain they’d moved it up to 4:15. Have you ever heard of such a thing, moving something up, with no notice?

And I don’t care about being in the picture, but I wanted to be in this one to right a wrong. You see for the senior yearbook, if you didn’t like your initial photo, you could have it reshot. Which I did. But the end result was… I wasn’t in the yearbook at all! I still have nightmares wherein I need to show my diploma and the college denies I was ever there. But if I was in this picture…

And I looked at the name tag of this nice woman and when I saw her moniker, I got a jolt.

She was the best-looking woman in “New Faces,” the original Facebook, wherein they had all the pics of the freshman class. The guys in the dorm salivated over her. I don’t think she ever knew.

So we saunter on over to Forest Hall, to registration, and after we get our name tags, which you’ve got to wear to get food or into any event, we go back to the sidewalk and encounter two girls, er, women, and first you look at the purse, er, the nametag, and then you know them and…

It’s all these years later, and the woman I’m talking to is cute. And nice. And I’m trying to square her with the person I remember and then…

Greg comes along, who I’ve maintained contact with, he wrote about me for the alumni magazine, and even in the internet era, I didn’t get a single response, and we had a good conversation, and then we went to the new Ross…

And saw all the white-haired people standing up, sitting down, conversing, and I got the urge to run.

We walked through the door and I immediately saw someone I didn’t want to talk to. This self-satisfied guy who probably doesn’t even remember my name. It’s a small college, you know everybody in your class, but you don’t really.

How am I going to get out of this?

And I start casing the joint…

And I don’t know a single person. How can this be?

Now I’m frightened, so I follow John to the bar, and we stand at a table, and I hang on for dear life.

I’m surveying the landscape and…who are these people? I felt like such an outsider.

But Bruce came up and we talked skiing. After all, the college had its own ski area. That’s one of the main reasons I went there, and I guess it was the right place, since that’s one thing I still do.

But the food was all the way on the other side of the hall, I’d have to run the gauntlet to get there, but ultimately I braved it.

And once again, I didn’t recognize anybody. This was not L.A., where a few courageous people let their hair go gray. But these people… Their hair had gone beyond gray, it was white, they were old, and then I wondered, HOW DO I LOOK? I must look as old as they do. And it depressed me.

Ultimately someone got up and gave a boring speech and this reinforced I was at the wrong place. But it was even worse when the aforementioned college President took the stand and started quoting statistics, how great the place was and…

I tuned out. Who cared, there was not going to be a test. Everybody was taking it so seriously, clapping, and it reminded me of nothing so much as…

Being there. This is one of the reasons I hated the place. Everybody took it so seriously, studied hard, as if by doing so they’d win in life. And I’m thinking of Irving Azoff and David Geffen who never graduated. I’m thinking of the person I was in the private jet with last week who never even bothered with college, telling me he was a bad student, but now manages household name bands.

This is not my place.

And I’m surveying the landscape, now with everybody seated. And I see must to avoids and people I now recognize and would love to catch up with, but how do I do this? I’m not even sure they’d remember me.

But I’d love to hear their story.

So I got Soupy’s. Who had that name because, of course, in elementary school, there were two Sues. And she was Sue P…and the name stuck. And we bonded over attitude and history, even though we were far from friends back then, and I felt more connected.

And then Dana came by. He lived on the first floor. Of course I remembered him, he remembered my name. And the funny thing is he’s the same guy, same laugh, same laughing attitude, and catching up with him was good.

This was what I was looking for. I wanted to talk to each and every person in attendance, spend time with them and find out what happened in all the intervening years. But they weren’t approaching me, and I didn’t have the chutzpah, the wherewithal, to go up to them and say…you might not remember me, but what happened in your life?

But I wanted to.

And everybody’s so different from home. It’s not how they look, but who they are. They want to talk about the books that they’ve read. It’s east coast, but also Middlebury. It’s an intellectual environment so different from California, at least my California, Los Angeles, where the most important thing is how you look, and maybe what car you drive, and that’s just phony enough for me.

And then there’s the anonymity of the big city. No one knows your name and no one cares. Which I love, it’s very different from a rural area.

And a number of my classmates have moved back to the area. And I understand the draw, the pull of Vermont, but to go to a smaller society…I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I don’t want to be judged.

And after we exited, or should I say escaped…

I felt relieved, but also disappointed. Was this the way it was going to be? Was I ever going to get to talk to all these people, most of whom were retired, gladly? They’d peaked, they’d done it for decades, it took me forever to hit my prime, and I’m still working.

And now I have this hunger to connect. But I’m not sure it will ever happen.

Man is this weird.