I am sitting in a hotel room in the town of my college alma mater, 26 1/2 years after graduating, for a few days of a ministry seminar. I have been back a handful of times over the years, but walking around campus today I found almost nothing familiar. The favorite places to hang out with my friends, the intramural sports fields, are now parking lots. Most of my old professors have died or retired. Current students look at me as something of a relic, like their dad has come for a weekend visit. Almost every building has been remodeled, and from a completely neutral perspective the campus is far, far better than it was when I was a student. I have found few people that I know this week, and the town feels as forgettable as my wholly forgettable chain hotel room.
Tonight while figuring out what to do my last night here I noticed that Grosse Pointe Blank was on TV. It's a movie about a 10 year homecoming that came out about 10 years after my high school graduation. In it a contract killer returns home for the first time in what seems like forever, finds his true love, and kills a bunch of other psychopaths along the way. He's actually more nervous about meeting the ghosts of his past than he is about killing people.
It brings to mind another movie about a 10-year homecoming that came out about 10 years after my high school days, Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion. There two outsiders return back to their high school were they were regularly ostracized while the people who were popular flamed out over the next few years.
These movies spoke to me now just as they did then, though I have never returned back for high school reunions, nor ever felt the need to. I went to my wife's, that was enough. While I never had the alienation or ostracization that others had in high school (and in the movies feel the need to correct), high school never felt like anything more than a place where I had a few friends and learned a lot of things. I wonder if something is wrong with me...is my social anxiety something that is not only about what happens in the current time, but also something that continues over time?
I think about so many people whose entire sense of worth comes because of an event or a place from their past...the glory days of high school, college, the military, a perfect road trip with friends...and they live the rest of their days never happy for never having really moved past that time in their lives. I feel so strange when I see people like that, as I don't think I've really hit my peak. I've had perfect days, of course, but there's no point in my life where I look back and think, it will never be better than this. And conversely, I don't look back with a sense of bitterness and remember a time where I thought (like many with the awkwardness of high school) it will never be worse than this.
It's all just history to me. Maybe I'm just far too content with my current life of two jobs, a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. Our histories are important, I know...but sometimes history seems so far away that it feels like a black and white silent movie.
I'm not sure why I come back for these things. I like hearing some of the speakers, though I'm at a point in life that really bad presentations will make me get up and leave with no sense of propriety. One seminar yesterday gave me the impression that the teacher learned he had a Sunday school class to give 10 minutes before it started and he thought that it went well then, so why not now? Today the speaker (a highly respected Brother) packed the room in order to proclaim the glories of western civilization and belittle the worst of anything else...I walked out then, too.
But I could listen to these classes on my own time. Why drive seven hours and spend hundreds of dollars to be around a group of strangers, many of whom I don't really have any interest in knowing? Why not just listen to them online?
Still I come back. Perhaps there is a sense that something magical will appear, that I yearn to be like the others I know that live in the past and so return to perhaps capture it again. Perhaps I will find those old friends and we'll stand out on the parking lot and set tennis balls on fire and smash them with bats. Perhaps I'll finally venture out towards the other end of town where all the townies live their lives and look forward to going to other places to sit in their own hotel rooms and write nonsense on a blog.
Still I come back.
