OMOC (Old Man On Campus)

I started my week with about 30 hours in Knoxville (TYS) before flying off to California for a day, and then back to TYS for a day, and so on for the week, shuttling back and forth between layovers at opposite ends of the country. I've been to Knoxville several times in the past five years. It seems like a nice enough little town, a place like so many across the country that would be a fine place to live and work, but which I'd never come to know if I had no external reason to be here. Out for a walk yesterday, I wandered off in a different direction than I usually do, and found myself on the campus of the University of Tennessee.

I'm a long time out of college now, nearly 20 years. By the usual schedule, I should have graduated with my bachelor's degree in 1984, but it took me another 5 years to accomplish the job--nearly 9 years total--because I was not a particularly good student and I had minimal motivation to finish the task; there was nothing waiting for me at the end of the tunnel that I gave a damn about, except a fear that failing to get my degree would be inexcusable and would gnaw at me as I grew older. Apparently that was enough to keep me with a finger on the grindstone, usually a single course per quarter--two at the most. I think because of this, my memories about my college years are centered less around college per se and more around the general business of young adulthood--living on my own, my early jobs, relationship things.

So it's a strange experience for me to wander on a beautiful day thru a large college campus and feel a flood of things, a resurgence of feelings I didn't really think were there in the first place. This experience is the stranger when my wife works on a small college campus; it's not as though I never see college-age people. But a small two-year campus is a whole different animal from a large four-year one. My wife's campus feels much like an extension of high school, with many students living at home, and the campus being solely an academic facility. The campus here at Tennessee reminds me of the main campus of the University of Minnesota, where I attended; it's really a separate and autonomous town from Knoxville proper. The number of students and faculty, and especially the large number of the students who live on campus, means that all the stuff needed to support them is concentrated on or near the campus--bookstores and bars and restaurants and clothing stores and budget auto repair and cell phone vendors. And these places have a very different flavor than they would have away from a college campus.

Most of the restaurants and bars have outdoor seating sections, and many have menus or daily special billboards written out in colored chalk by someone exercising a budding visual artistry. Everything is wraps or sandwiches or pizza. And beer. Everybody has what I remember as a "college car," barely-functional but inexpensive basic transportation, except the lucky few who come from money and who are driving the latest cool thing: a CRV or an Audi TT or the like. There are lots of older motorcycles. Unofficial student housing is in a league of its own. Many of the old houses and dilapidated apartment buildings are almost falling in on themselves. Many are decades overdue for fresh paint, and nobody tends to the yard. But thru the filthy windows, past the sheets-cum-drapes, the old houses are alive with the hallmarks of college life: bookcases and sports memorabilia and beer can collections and stereo systems. I can't help thinking about the steady stream of fresh students who inhabit these places, year after year after year, each like a clearing house that leaves a mark on all who pass thru. Some of them have cute little signs: "The Mermaid House--Welcome to Paradise." A few of these things strike a chord of experience with me.

But I think the real thing at work is the business, older than humanity itself, of aging, of the passage of time. It's mostly subtle things. In my own mind, I'm still the same guy I was in my 20s. But with every year that passes that illusion becomes flimsier and flimsier. And nothing works better than a stroll thru a college campus to remind me of this. Not a single person I encountered today would confuse me now for a fellow traditional student. The normal person likely thinks I'm somebody's dad, on campus to check up on junior. Everyone is dressed in shorts and t-shirts, but the kids wear this standard uniform differently than I do. Even the pudgy ones. 20 is such an exciting age--we're settling into the heady business of adulthood, and into so many new things in life: living out on our own, managing our finances, being faced with major decisions about the future, relationship things.

And sex. Sex is everywhere in college, in a way that simply isn't the case in high school (this is not to imply that no high schoolers have sex, but only that when they get to college most people stop hiding it or apologizing for it). I guess a guy like me commenting on the sex lives of people young enough to be my kids has an inherently skeevy ring to it, and I don't mean to be crass about it, or to reduce any person to this facet alone. But let's face it: it's a huge part of who we are, and the awakening of this part of our lives represents one of the key changes from what we have lived before. Our sexual sense of self is one of the key arenas where we assert, or choose not to assert, ourselves as young adults. It's one of the central ways we assess each other. It's maybe the biggest marker of my life's hourglass that I'm much more keenly aware of this at 44 than I was at 22. I always want to invoke some dictum of biology in this situation, some defense along the lines that guys are supposed to find 20-something women essentially sexy. Again, not to imply that these young women are not funny and intelligent and wise and nurturing and many other varied and virtuous things; but it's the nature of things that sexuality needs the least introduction. It emanates like light from our core.

I have a little sensation, somewhere between a flutter of intoxication and a little panic attack, to see young couples walking around campus, knowing that the whole business is quite new and exciting and formative (he says, sounding like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi!). How deep inside of us is built this mechanism, this discovery that seems to every one of us like we invented the world ourselves from scratch. I can read this plainly on these young faces. It's the more thrilling and poignant when, from my perch in middle age, I can see how fleeting this magic window of youth is. In what seems the blink of an eye, this period of near-perfect physical vitality will skate past and leave us all in a different place. A good place, hopefully, but a different one.

Maybe the day will come when I might earnestly wish to be a different age. I've never felt that, and I don't feel it now. Life is very, very good, and 44 is a great age. But it always takes me bit by surprise to see how many things turn up in my past, rather than as experiences I might look forward to. That balance is always shifting. If life is a rope of finite length, we pull it hand-over-hand with a larger and larger portion of it ending up coiled behind us until there is no more rope. And it always surprises me to see how much of the coil is already back there. I'm at an age where I'm still eagerly pulling on the rope, with no sense or sight of exactly where along its length I am. But the simplest math tells me that my perpetually-20 internal compass is trending seriously wide of the mark.

I really would dread having to go back and do my college years over again, but it's affecting to see people in the midst of what may be their most vital and formative years. For the import of those days, for that immersion, I might be excused a little melancholy introspection.

How rich and varied and improbable and beautiful is this life.