10 Years

I am old.  To be going back to your 10 Year college reunion means just that.  Well, that and whenever you hear sports casters talking about aging veterans on professional teams and then you see that they’re talking about players who are still younger than you.

It also didn’t help that this year, the reunion weekend was held during school.  In the past, the weekend has been held during the summer.  This time, while we walked the campus, students were going about their business.  Thinking about how these freshmen were 8 years old when we first started is really depressing.

When walking around with another couple, we were passed by some young students known to them (cousins?  youth group members?  illegitimate children?  not sure – didn’t catch that part).  We posed the question to them if we could pass as students, perhaps if we had backpacks slung over our shoulders, but they didn’t hesitate one bit to say no.  Bummer.

Sara and I changed our plans 4 times over the weekend.  The idea was to spend Saturday in GR for the events of that day (there were events Friday night, but we knew we wouldn’t be able to make in time for them).  We had 2 time constraints.  The first was the brunch at 10am for the reunion.  The other was I had a meeting at church at 9:45am on Sunday.  We thought we’d drive down Friday night and leave Saturday night.  Well, Friday night, Alex was not doing well with the teething, so we thought we’d just go down first thing Saturday morning after some sleep.  (Definitely not a full night of sleep since we had to get up early enough to get there for breakfast).  Well we got out late, but we did make it to GR just at the end for the last bit of eggs and waffles.

We were still planning on leaving that night until there were talks of after parties (which never did materialize) and the fact that we were already tired from being up so early.  So we decided during dinner to stay over and leave early in the morning.  This actually worked out very well as driving during the daylight was certainly easier than driving at night (you know, being old, my eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be.  Wait, they’ve never been sharp).

The day shaped up like this.  After brunch at 11, we perused the bookstore and a few of our old haunts around campus.  Then we headed over to Lindsey’s house to drop Alex off with Uncle D (and squeeze a 30 minute nap in).  At 3, we took a tour of the new Communications Arts and Science building and got a close up look at all their new high tech toys.  We also got to catch the last bit of the Future Planning session in which we saw concept drawings of the new Common’s building and Fine Arts Center.  Yep – a ton of improvements will be made over the next 5 years that will really improve things on campus and make us want to go back to school even more.

We had another hour to kill between the sessions and dinner, so we walked around the campus some more with friends.  Then we met up with more classmates for hors d’oeuvres.  A class photo was taken, then it was on to the main course.  We played a round of Calvin Jeapordy (in which our table did not get one question right), followed by dessert.

It was great to see a bunch of faces again that we hadn’t seen in a long, long time.  There were a few other names on the online guest list that I was really hoping to see and chat with, but apparently they could only make it for the Friday night events and not stay around for the dinner.  Still, it was good touching base again with those that were around, too.