College

The annual alumni magazine from our alma mater came in the mail today. It’s a nice, slick book: heavy-stock pages, brilliant full color, great design and layout. But I don’t recognize anything in any of the images of the campus. The foyers shown are modern architecture steel and glass. The classrooms are high-tech with bright, flat-panel LCD monitors on the tables, and big, clear projected displays on the walls. I’m impressed, and jealous.

My wife and I met in our college years, and we used to visit the old campus at least once a year. But we haven’t been in almost 5 years, now, and it seems the school has vastly changed its look in that time.

The campus in our day was homey, well-kept, and pretty—all red bricks, white columns, and pink azaleas. It’s now, apparently, judging from the magazine, all modern and high-tech. And that’s cool, but it’s very different. In my day, the campus looked like an Ivy League school (it isn’t). Now, in the magazine, it looks like a Fortune 500 company.

My college experience was fun. The things I remember most fondly of those days, in no particular order:

– Spending time with my girlfriend on and off campus. (She’s now my wife.)
– Playing table games and console games with my friends. (Super Nintendo!)
– Going to the beach between classes. (Campus is just 5 miles from the ocean.)
– Walking, running, exploring, and playing on campus with my dog.
– Charlie Daniels’s speech at my graduation.

Yeah, that’s right: Charlie Daniels was the commencement speaker at my graduation. In your face, Ivy Leaguers! His was the best commencement speech I’ve ever heard. (I’ve been to four college commencements.) I would have loved to thank him and shake his hand, but there was no way to even get close to him in a university commencement crowd. I used to work with a woman who was related to Charlie. After hearing me brag about his speech, she got me an autographed glossy from him, signed to me. Now that’s cool.

You probably noticed there isn’t anything about actual school work in my list of fond remembrances. Yeah, I notice that too. It’s sad that study and learning is often not appreciated by those at the age when formal education is presented. Although, it’s ironic that most of what I ended up needing to know in my careers was never offered or covered in my college courses. But I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by that. I mean, Computer Science, Biology, and Engineering are careers straight from college majors; English is only useful for making you sound ostentatious at dinner parties.

“These new Southern writers just do not have the depth of story and color of phrase like classic Faulkner and O’Conner. It is a shame, too. We have lost the beautiful heritage of the written word. . . .”
— English major with a chip on his shoulder because he can’t get a publisher interested in his manuscript

But anyway, back to the ole college campus as depicted in the alumni magazine: I wonder if the current students occasionally show up to class smelling of sunscreen and saltwater like we sometimes used to.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com