As 50th college reunion nears, Mark Patinkin says the spirited, rebellious mindset lingers
There’s this moment I still remember from my first college reunion.
A weekend highlight was the processional of all returning classes, including the one marking the most celebrated year.
Fifty.
Being 26, I found it impossible to imagine getting to that point. A part of me assumed I never would. I was too young to ever be that old.
Yet somehow, here I am – sending in my registration for my own 50th at Vermont’s Middlebury College.
Schools make a big effort around that number, complete with a “yearbook” asking for life bios and remembrances of our shared campus journey.
It’s funny what stands out in memory from then – like the very first night on campus as we arrivals gathered in the white-steepled chapel, the president telling us to look around, because the odds were that for many of us, our future spouses were somewhere in this sanctuary.
That was a daunting thought, but those next days, it indeed became the class sport to study with almost Talmudic obsession the pamphlet showcasing freshman photos. "New Faces" it was called, inevitably nicknamed Funny Faces. No need for Mark Zuckerberg; we had our own printed version.
I also remember the way our freshman dorm corridor, near midnight on Saturdays, resembled feeding time at a primate house as word went out that a student business of entrepreneurial genius had arrived to sell jelly doughnuts. Mindful of the cravings triggered from smoking a certain inebriant, the doughnut sellers named themselves “The Munchies.”
Being young and slightly insane, there were also cold nights when students with too much energy and too little sense began sledding on cafeteria trays down the long sloping walkway below the chapel. “Traying,” we called it.
Ah, that weather. Our first year, 1970, the Vermont snow built up so high that plows had to crank their blades 4 feet off the ground to push drifts to the side. Middlebury had a 4-1-4 semester plan, just one course during January term, in my case a writing class, with an essay assigned daily, sending me, as James Joyce wrote in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” to hone my future craft “in the smithy of my soul.”
The landscape outside my dorm window that month was pure white, like a crisp canvas, which sharpened the mind to the task. I often played the same vinyl record while at my Smith-Corona typewriter, and “White Bird,” by the group It’s a Beautiful Day, still brings me back.
So do countless other songs that formed our backbeat – “Moondance,” “Heart of Gold” and so many more played on turntables through big walnut speakers in tiny, thin-walled dorm rooms on crowded corridors with shared bathrooms, all of which somehow created happiness for our 20-ish selves.
I tell my children that no music has equaled the classic rock of that era, causing them to roll their eyes, which then gets me insisting I was better at Pong in the back of the town bar called The Alibi than they are at Call of Duty.
“Sure, Dad,” they say, then go back to scrolling TikTok.
I sometimes think I haven’t understood anything since 1974.
My freshman year was the last curtain call for a now quaint concept called “parietals,” wherein the freshman girls’ dorm was locked at 10 p.m., with no visitors of the male variety allowed. It should be admitted today that men back then, when hoping for romance and out with a freshman female as that hour approached, walked her back to the dorm slowly enough to be late, then chivalrously offered shelter.
If the offer was declined, there was always a female dorm-mate to open a back window for sneaking in without the knowledge of the dorm mother at the front entrance.
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You would think the passage of five decades would mute the trauma of college’s stresses, but I still get a whisper of PTSD when recalling the dreaded blue books handed out before exams. Their pages were as blank as my panicky mind sometimes was on those days, the rooms silent but for bursts of pencil scratches, which you hoped would slow down, because you hadn’t begun writing yet.
God knows what made us think an all-nighter just before finals would make up for weeks of neglected course work, but that’s the freshman mind. Once, the day before finals, while studying with friends in a dorm lounge at 2 a.m., we saw a classmate with bloodshot eyes disappear into the bathroom, then reappear dripping, having taken a cold shower fully clothed to wake himself. It earned him a round of applause, and I hold on to that moment as a metaphor of a college student – chaotic but committed.
Our years there were also a serious political time, the era of Vietnam protests, with classmates taking buses to marches in Washington. When student deferments were about to end, there were worried gatherings around radios as the Vietnam draft lottery rankings were announced by birthdate.
And yet despite the times, the memory of those years focuses on the more personal – the richness of books and professors, of friendship and romance – of pursuits more typical of what the heart of college is about in any era.
One does tend to put a burnished patina on the past, yet, despite its stresses, our journey a half century ago was a mostly golden time, the last chapter of both our youth and long hair. I think for most people, the name of their college will always evoke deep things in the heart.
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God knows how it happened that in only a few months, we’ll assemble at our reunion weekend’s alumni procession as the most notable older class, the one marking 50 years.
I’m guessing that many younger returnees will see us as I once saw the half-century returnees – those cute almost-elderly folks.
What they won’t know is that somewhere in us, there still lingers the spirited, rebellious mindset we had in 1974.
I suppose there’s no reason to explain that to them.
As we process with our graying hair up the walkway, where we once sledded on trays, it’ll be our secret.
mpatinki@providencejournal.com
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Middlebury College 50th class reunion a special time for Mark Patinkin
