Live from Stark Vegas

Coming back to the college town where I did my undergraduate was surreal. I left Podunk about the same time I used to when I went home for the weekends when I was in school. Just making the trip, seeing the turns, made me feel a duality of time. I was myself, but I was also that girl who used to go to school here in Starkville, and holding both of those people within me was not altogether comfortable or nostalgic.

Starkville and MSU were good to me. I made friends here I still treasure. There are parts of campus that I saw as I drove through today that triggered memories both rich and trivial.

That being said, I went through some very intense and not always pleasant things here. I guess it would have been the same anywhere with any college student. College, by definition, is a time of change and transformation. It's where the last of our childhood is shed, and sometimes that shedding isn't strictly voluntary.

Driving past the place where the dorm I stayed my sophomore year used to be (used to be because they dynamited it and built something else), I remembered standing downstairs folding laundry when my friend came down to tell me my grandfather was dead. Passing the on-campus apartments, I remember late nights trying to finish an insane course load my senior year and almost going next door with a cast iron skillet to beat my loud-music-playing neighbors to death. Those apartments also triggered memories of the night I found out my grandmother had pancreatic cancer and my friend came over and let me cry on him until I could pull it all together again.

There are lighter things. The Tin Gym still stands where two of my friends and I used to go to an "abs" class to work on our waistlines and ogle the instructor (mmmm....Greg....). The Drill Field where we flew kites in the spring still shines like a green jewel, if you can figure out a way to get to it through the endless and ubiquitous orange construction mesh.

The carillion and the Chapel of Memories still sit at the center of campus, playing songs on the hour. It holds the piano that other angst-filled night denizens and I used to politely, but with no contact or conversation, share. One of us would arrive and play. For that time, the chapel belonged to that person. The others slipped in and out through hidden side doors like shadows, always making sure the door made no noise to distract the one who was purging whatever had driven them from their dorms long after the prudent had gone to bed.

Tomorrow, I'll spend my day in the new, space-age-looking Hunter Henry Center working on rating and refining items for state testing. I hope I'll have some more time to walk around campus some to see if I can revive or lay to rest some of the memories that have arisen.