I feel I must unabashedly address my class, the soon-to-graduate Class of 1998 and share my thoughts on our days together. As the curtain now drops on our undergraduate life, what memories will we have to carry with us of these four magical, budding years? Our tenure here has been tempered by both sweet and bitter days, days of
discourse and of debate, tolerance and challenge, innocence and experience. This is my tribute to our experience, to our school, and to these days I've so loved.
The Pit was a cafeteria, not a fast food strip, when first we dined there, and it wasn't lit up like Times Square. There was no frozen yogurt, no designer gourmet coffee and no Pizza Hut delivery in covered golf carts. Krispy Kreme was open twenty-four hours and the Dessertery wasn't quite so swank.
Our ID cards wouldn't pick up the laundry tab, and the dorms didn't lock until the witching hour. There was no cushy air-conditioning to ease the sweltering heat of August and September, no labels to decode the mangled halls of Tribble Hall, no high-tech, ergonomic, slouch-back rubber desks and no newfangled Ethernet connection sockets.
Life was, looking back on it, happy, and somehow simpler.
Students still used answering machines, word processors and Macintoshes, still saved quarters for their laundry and still kept fans in their windows. Vegas was a computer lab, not a Spring Break destination. The med school was called Bowman Gray, and the business school, Babcock. Luter Residence Hall was Greek-free, Babcock, man-free. And, you could enter campus from Polo Road after ten o'clock.
We watched, somewhat green-eyed, as the laptops started to dot the campus, marveling at the university's technological revolution yet quietly fearing our educational experience had already become obsolete.
We shared the wisdom of William Rehnquist, James Earl Jones, Tony Campolo and Harold Kushner; the music of Itzak Pearlman, George Winston, They Might Be Giants and the Indigo Girls; and the enchantment of Diane Sawyer, Ted Koppel, A.R. Ammons, Alec Baldwin and our own Maya Angelou. Life has been rich.
We cheered Randolph, Rusty, Timmy and Tony to Atlantic Coast Conference glory, applauded the debate team's national title, and welcomed the Euzelians and Philomathesians back into the annals of University history.
We tearfully buried nine of our peers, a president emeritus, a Wachovia teller, a Mag Room server and a soccer coach. Memories, shared and alone, lurk around every corner of our Alma Mater. I walk around the Quadrangle and see the luminaries aglow for the Love Feast and chuckle at the toilet paper roll lodged in the tree.
I think of the friends I made at PreSchool; a stolen kiss on Davis Field; all-night paperwriting in the computer lab; awkward freshman mixers on the Mag Patio; the shadow of Wait Chapel in the clouds on a foggy night; an insufferable Calculus class; the attentive ears and shared shoulder of a friend when my grandmother died; the swings outside Scales; a quiet moment in Davis Chapel; long heart-to-hearts in Shorty's; a professor who enlivened my world with poetry; saunters through Reynolda Gardens and eating Hero House subs by the waterfall.
I think of Venice, of which memories of my fall semester haunt me daily. I can walk around here and in my mind go back to the music of the gondoliers, the regalia of the Regatta, the still water of the dark canals; the aroma of pane dolce; the majesty of Casa Artom and the camaraderie of the family life there. All of these memories have forever tied my heart and soul to that place and to its people.
The poet William Wordsworth wrote that his one-time vision of "a host of golden daffodils" often flashed in his mind when he lay reposed on his couch, pensive and placid.
May the class of 1998, as we with fear-tinged excitement sally forth to start life anew, forever cherish and preserve the memories that we together made during these all too fleeting years.
Like Wordsworth, may we reap enjoyment and solace from those memories when they are no more than photographs and echoes in our minds. More than classes, it will be those remembrances that will last.
Not long ago, my friend and history study partner asked me, "Do you remember when we stayed up all night the eve of Dr. Barefield's final, cramming in names and dates, and choking down bitter coffee to keep ourselves awake?"
"And in the morning," I continued, "waiting at the doors of the Pit as they opened, scarfing down omelets, and then blasting the "O Fortuna" chorus from Carmina Burana in your car, just as the sun was rising over Scales?"
"That was awesome," he said. "Yeah," I agreed. We laughed and shook our heads.
"I don't remember that test very well," he said.
"No," I replied. "Me neither." |