Po-town bound

I’m going to my college reunion in a couple of weeks. My college, Vassar, is in Poughkeepsie, New York. At this point I’m resigned to the trip, and on some days looking forward to it. But with all of the end-of-school-year activities, celebrations, and ceremonies to attend for both of my kids, plus the regular overbooked life we lead, this whirlwind trip from California to New York for the weekend is a little crazy. My husband, who also attended Vassar, does not wish to go. He has a busy work week, and there are about 50 other destinations ahead of Poughkeepsie on his list of weekend escapes.

After some thought, I decided to bring my daughter with me on the trip. I would have loved a trip like this at her age. She is thrilled to be going to the place where her parents met. Thinking about my daughter, although she is only in second grade, reminds me of my first trip to Vassar. I was 16 years old and on my “college tours.” This meant that my cousin Louis, who lived in nearby Fishkill, was kind enough to pick me up from the White Plains airport and drive me to Vassar and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. My family probably didn’t have any idea that most of the other kids on the school tour would be with their parents. But it would not have mattered, since my mom was in no position to pay for more than one airfare. Clusters of families, fathers, mothers, teenagers (usually in another college’s sweatshirt), and some younger siblings, walked with my cousin and me. The glossy admissions brochures sprang to life as our tour group filed in and out of the magnificent library and through buildings named for some of America’s most prominent families. It was late April or early May. Tulips were in bloom, and all around me were amazing, perfect green lawns. My tour guide was a beautiful young woman from Chicago. I brightened when I learned this. I was from Wisconsin, and as a young child, I had lived in Chicago.

What a coincidence! I thought. Another girl from the Midwest.

But this girl from the Midwest, my gracious tour guide, had just come back from spring break, visiting her French boyfriend and skiing in the Swiss Alps. That did not compute for me. How did she meet the French guy? Did her parents go with her to Switzerland?

I’m going to France, I volunteered. On my school trip. This summer. Because I’ve been studying French for three years.

My guide smiled at my sweetness.

Ahh, I had found it. The common denominator. Phew.

My guide took a liking to me (or so I hoped), and when the tour was done, she took me with her to lunch at the school cafeteria. Along the way, we met a group of such free-spirited people that it made me smile. I had just been in my high school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and I was ready and looking for signposts for art and enlightenment. It’s been 25 years, so the details are fuzzy. But in my mind’s eye, a handsome guy with a tie-dyed shirt gave me an ephemeral look and a breathy hello along the wooded path to lunch. My guide seemed to think this was noteworthy, that someone who’d never met me would be so friendly. She said so as we sat with her friends, other girls about midway through college, who lived in a dorm that sounded like a name out of the Preppy Handbook. As we walked back to where my cousin was meeting me, I became convinced that this college really was the place for me. All the signs, particularly the friendly tour guide and the unexpected friendliness from a stranger, pointed to the universe wanting me to be here. Plus, I really liked the letter “V.” I considered a number of college, but really Vassar (and Vanderbilt) had a leg up on the other because they began with the letter V. Carleton, Macalaster, Mount Holyoke, and all the others? Feh.

This is what happens when you give a clueless child like I was too much control over decisions that actually matter.

I later learned that it was the start to Founders Day weekend at Vassar, a weekend dedicated to honoring the college founder, Matthew Vassar, a nineteenth-century beer brewer. There had always been lots of beer and music over the weekend, but the festival’s unofficial purview now included plenty of hallucinogenic drugs. And there were always students who began partaking before the weekend began, which is what I came to believe was going on with the friendly, sylvan man-elf.

I was lucky enough to be accepted to Vassar. I hadn’t seriously considered what to do if I wasn’t accepted, since matriculating became the beginning and end to all my obsessive teenage dreams. My high school career was quirky and semi-distinguished, but very uneven. And that’s just how my college career at Vassar turned out to be, minus anything that includes the word “distinguished.” Unlike many of my disciplined and well-trained peers, I didn’t have work habits that matched my ambition. My time at college was marked by unfinished projects and a few conversations with professors and deans where, at best, I was exhorted to try harder. I was a student on full scholarship, and this made matters worse for me (and no doubt any college administrator looking over the books). Over four and a half painful years, I learned lots of hard lessons and finally, earned the coveted degree (but just barely).

In the 20 years that have passed, I have gone through a set of Kubler-Ross-like stages of grief for this period and the institution. My husband was a very good student, and he’s not in a hurry to go back either. Late adolescence and early adulthood is a time not all of us remember with fondness. There are friends I would like to reconnect with, and places that I want to see again. But the pull to go to the reunion, back to Po-town, is really the desire for closure. I could have done it on my own, I guess. I am not quite sure if bringing my daughter along is so that I can have a New York adventure with her, complete with a Broadway show and lunch at the only restaurant she remembers from a family trip three years ago, a tea shop where the servers (pissed-off-looking New York actors) wear angel wings. Or if she is my best talisman against regret.