O Ivied Walls O Storied Halls

Chris Osmond
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read
https://www.wesleyan.edu/communications/media/photos/Wesleyan-College-Row.jpg

I stutter-started my semester this fall. I met with all my students once, then abandoned them to substitutes and videos and left for a week to take our eldest to college far away in the north. He’s in a dining hall having breakfast right now, or the palatial a la carte facility that passes for a dining hall these days. I miss him. He is gone.

His departure, though anticipated, has still surprised me, because it has me thinking about how I learned about leaving. What I got wrong, and what I know now.

I was the eldest son of only children. My grandparents passed early, no aunts or uncles, little extended family to speak of other than my parents’ chosen one. And Dad was active duty military, which meant a lot of moving around in my early life, most of which I remember too deep inside me to actually recall.

He became a reservist when I was in third grade, and we stayed put for seven years. I made good friends and made a place of my own.

And then we moved again, one more time, just as I was starting tenth grade. It was devastating to leave the first people I had really let into my life. The friends that had begun to co-make me, and I them.

I remember so clearly my Mom telling me that when you move around a lot, the key was to sink your roots fast, and sink them deep. It was always implied that they would be torn up again soon, and it would be terrible. But you’d be better off having dug in than stayed aloof.

But leaving is still leaving. Suck it up.

So the real nut here is that the past is not supposed to come back, for people like me. But I have learned that it does, for many many people. For many many people, the past never leaves. Here in the mountains of western North Carolina, there are a few ubiquitous surnames. There are families inseparable from this place. There are people who have never been to the other end of the county. “Provincial” means of this country, utterly. It’s not always pejorative. When you see yourself reflected back to you in every turn, every barn, every stone, you never wonder who you are.

So there are many people for whom what I did last week would not have been existentially weird. I was dropped off at that same college thirty-one years ago. I schlepped my son’s record crate up the same stairs I schlepped my own in the waning Reagan years. Every turn on move-in day was haunted in the deep way that things you’re never supposed to see again, then do, are. Everything dripping with import and echoes, not a stick or brick without a story.

But then, suddenly, it wasn’t. I shook my head and it cleared, and it was just college, and I was just another dad delivering my boy to his future (neither “best dressed” nor “most stressed,” two categories the campus newspaper apparently reports on every move-in day).

What a weird and wonderful view, this double vision.

It helped, a little, to realize that the stones in the cemetery at the top of the hill at the center of campus said the same things they said thirty years ago, or a hundred. The buildings still had the same names as the headstones.

It even helped to recognize the names of a few new buildings from my frosh class schedule. Beckham Hall, Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall. I was a part of that history too, now, through no effort other than daily persevering. The history was only visible because I had moved away. Life did what it does, and we all play our parts. I’m to play mine by remembering the stories and telling them when it is time, and putting them aside when it is not. (Which is usually.)

The capstone was at the end-of-day alumni parent do, when I recognized a nametag and did the math on a graduation year and was suddenly face-to-face with someone I’d sung with in a campus production in fall 1987. Her performance of a song had seared into my memory (frosh year I was wide open, more susceptible to searing than perhaps I’ve ever been since). She had been lost to my history, another cooler upperclass student who’d been part of something precious and now was gone. But her voice had stayed with me, the cardinal performance of a song I’d lived with ever since.

And now here she was, another punch-drunk, heat-stroked parent at the end of a dizzying day. We caught up on the intervening decades, our measures of tragedy and joy, and marveled at it. Here we were in a building that hadn’t existed then but now did, dropping off new people to have their time. Sad and beautiful — and so specific, so true and so insignificant, all at once. Lives forming each other and moving on.

So now I know that it is good to sink roots deep — and to leave them there, at least partially, when it is time to go. Leave them buried deep, but still vital, ready to sustain us when we need them. This maybe my parents did not know, or at least did not tell me, or I did not hear. But I know it now, and am grateful for it.

The past is past and still here both, as close as a (carefully-deployed) social media account, as close as a twelve-hour interstate drive. It looks like for the next four years I’ll have the chance to walk next to my past and within my son’s glorious present all at once.

What a privilege to have this second sight. What a responsibility not to overdetermine the now with the then unless asked, and even then not too much. (History only matters if you want to read it, anyway.)

Soon our son will show up in the Facebook feed of the campus eatery that opened my last year on campus. He started working there, for two old friends, last night. I now have photos of our youngest son on the hill where I played at eighteen, and my Dad before me, and a thousand thousand dads and moms before him.

“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!” posted a dear poet-bard friend, meta-digging our shared past as deep Star Trek TNG geeks. A story about how we are no more than our stories — and our stories are enough.

We’ll all be young again together.

Life’s short; then fill with joy its span.

Chris Osmond

Written by

Somewhere down there, there’s a sliver of green just taking its time. This is how everything works. You wait, you lay low, and then you come to life.

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