I’ve just returned from my Carleton Reunion—I graduated in 1973—and am still sorting out what it all meant. I reconnected with old roommates, signed copies of my book in the bookstore, played tennis and softball (Our slogan: “The enemy is not the other team; the enemy is hamstring pulls.”), gave a talk on the Hollywood Renaissance of 1965-75, listened to a Pulitzer Prize-winning classmate describe living amidst both Arabs and Israelis as he grew up (Kai Bird’s memoir is Crossing Mandelbaum Gate), marveled at how Carleton appears to be swimming in money while the state college where I teach is scraping by, and reminisced with former fellow protesters about getting arrested in 1971 when we shut down the Hennepin County Courthouse after the Kent State shootings.
At times I felt swept back into the early 1970s, although I didn’t “weep like a child for the past,” as D. H. Lawrence describes himself doing in his wonderful poem “The Piano”:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Perhaps I’ve shied away from alumni reunions in the past because I was worried about becoming emotionally swallowed up in “the flood of remembrance.” One just has to read Sons and Lovers to realize that Lawrence had a hard time moving on beyond his mother. Would attending these gatherings slow my forward progress?
One fellow classmate (Mike Hazard), not in attendance and explaining his reluctance to attend reunions, alerted me to a passage from Minnesota poet Tom McGrath’s epic poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend: “Nostalgia is decayed dynamite.” I don’t know the poem and so don’t know the context for the passage, but I relate to the fear that returning to the past can blow up in one’s face somehow. Even decayed dynamite packs a punch. Maybe I’ve been afraid that returning would reveal to me my failures, how I haven’t lived up to my dreams.
But if that is one’s worry, that’s all the more reason to attend a reunion. One doesn’t move beyond one’s fears by avoiding them.
Indeed, what I found was that everyone there had gone on to live lives more or less like mine. Although there was a wide range of stories, from success to disappointment and from great joy to heartbreaking grief, somehow we had all been using our liberal arts education and our residential campus experience in similar ways. We had an amazing amount in common, which isn’t surprising in retrospect as we had all been shaped by the same chaotic times, the Vietnam War and the draft, the various liberation movements, the counterculture. The reunion was like all of us returning to our place under the piano, finding people who knew and understood us after all these years. Manhood and womanhood was momentarily cast from us as we were seized by the insidious mastery of memory.
Maybe that’s the best reason to go to your reunion: rather than being confronted by your failures, you may find yourself feeling less alone.