Saying Good-bye

Recently I attended a lunch for my favorite professor from undergrad. I hadn't seen either him or his wife since graduation day, literally decades ago, but I've kept in touch with each of them over the years via e-mail and Christmas cards. They've both been phenomenally supportive of me an all of my career choices. As a kid, I looked up to both of them as models of how to live life and as I've grown older my view has not changed. I was specifically invited, singled out from the mass e-mailing that announced their arrival in Chicago, and I couldn't refuse to see them.

But it was the mass e-mail part that made me a little itchy.

I'm not the only one who feels this way about this professor and his wife. In fact, almost all the students he taught in more than twenty years of being a professor feel this way. We all feel that these two people were instrumental in shaping us into the people we've become and we all feel grateful.

But we don't all feel that way about one another.

Although I knew that there was no way to get out of the lunch, and I absolutely wanted to see these two people, I have to admit to being sort of cowardly and responded to my individual invitation with "um...so who else do you think will be there?" The response rattled off at least a dozen names I recognized, three of which were people I need never see again. I spent a couple of days stewing about what to do and how to handle the meeting. I'm not nearly as successful as I would like if and when I ever meet these people again. Although I've not been ravaged by the sands and winds of time, I no longer look nineteen. I wasn't even sure I'd have clean clothes.

Then I realized that the people I was dreading seeing again no longer exist. At best, these people are distorted memories in my head. I'm not the same person I was as a theater major. Why would I expect that they would be? I decided I was being silly and so I went.

And do you know what? None of the people I dreaded seeing showed up. Instead, I spent a lovely afternoon reconnecting with people I hadn't thought about in years. It was a nice little stroll down memory lane. There were so many people there that it was impossible to get much time with my professor and his wife. But that was OK. There was a lot of laughter. A lot of hugs and promises to keep in touch. And then it was done. It was a lot like what I imagine heaven must be like.

When I left, I had a very strange feeling, like I'd just returned from a magical time journey. I was at once nineteen and forty five. The feeling stayed with me for days. And then it was done. When the day sort of receded into my memory, so did a lot of those undergrad days. It was like tidying up that room that has been cluttered for far too long, putting away the things of value and tossing the things that are useless. That luncheon did that for me. But it has helped me put a lot of things away. Since that luncheon different pages from my past seem to be cropping up and demanding that they be put into their proper place, either in a scrap book or the waste basket. My childhood home, a friends altered blog page, a nemesis's career successes, have all brought up old feelings that I recognize as old. Not relevant to who I am today or what I'm doing.

Somewhere along the way, when I wasn't really paying attention, I might just have grown up.