A Sort of Homecoming

I was out walking a few mornings ago after sleeping in (relatively) late. The sky was gray, the ridiculously humid air already had me cranky, and the day was starting off in a manner that made it seem like staying in bed probably would have been a better option. As I walked, I tried to think of a way I could turn all of this around, knowing I had a long and horrible day ahead of me if I didn’t.

I thought to the summer vacation to-do list of sticky notes on my fridge, and remembered how one said to take a day trip up to St. Cloud. This is the city where I went to college and lived for five of my favorite years (I earned a minor, an extra licensure, and had to student teach for a term if you’re wondering why it took five years, thank you very much). Over the years I’ve made a few trips back up there just to see if I could get a little nostalgia buzz from the campus or the city, but it had probably been close to ten years since my last visit. Generally I’m one to focus on moving forward instead of spending a lot of time thinking about what’s behind me, and college is far enough back now that it’s not even something I feel can relate to anymore. But, if there’s any place from my past that’s earned an occasional backward glance, it would have been there. Like I said, it was home for five of my favorite years.

With nothing else pressing going on, I decided that trip would be a good way to reboot the day. After returning from the walk, cleaning up, and eating a quick breakfast, I put together a quick playlist of one hundred one-time favorite college songs. I probably hadn’t listened to most of them in at least ten or fifteen years, but they were all important enough at one time to be tagged with very specific memories, and together they made a perfect soundtrack for the day.

The drive up only took about an hour and brought back some nostalgia on its own. How many times had I driven that same stretch of highway? How many times had I stopped at the gas station in Becker? How many different mix tapes had I played in the car, in the cheap boom box I kept on the passenger seat because the cassette player in my car always lost sound whenever I made a left turn? How many times did my sister Erin borrow my car and return it to me with greasy residue all over the steering wheel from the Doritos she and her friends had on their road trip? (To be fair, that was only once. But the memory is vivid.)

The sky was full of thick clouds, which made me think of a time when we judged the weather on a road trip by what we would see through the windshield instead of the radar image on a smartphone. As I passed through Clear Lake, I thought of the girl from there who had stomped on my heart pretty bad, but now smiled at the memory of it. When I turned off the highway right by the prison (which was the faster way to reach campus), I remembered how slowing down to drive that particular road meant I had returned to St. Cloud, and I'd always get the feeling, powerful and independent and relieving all at once, that I was back home.

The quiet south side neighborhoods surrounding the campus looked like they could have been plucked out of an older section of Minneapolis then transplanted and accessorized with oak trees and granite. In fact, I was surprised to be reminded of exactly how inescapable the granite is in St. Cloud -- almost as inescapable as all of the apartment buildings. It is a college town after all, especially on the south side. It was almost comforting to recognize so many of the apartment complexes, including a couple I had lived in, along with the enormous old houses that would be taken over as off-campus housing when the students returned in the fall. I recognized enough of those houses to make me nervous for the kids who’d be living in them; those places had looked run-down and tentative when I was in school, so I had to think a strong breeze would be enough to test their structural integrity now.

The roads around campus had changed some, but I found a place I could park without having to worry about the minimal summer campus security tagging my car while I explored. It was astonishing to discover how many of the older buildings still smelled exactly like they had so long ago, and just as astonishing that I could remember those smells. Regardless of the buildings I walked through, there were bulletin boards up on just about any section of wall large enough to hold one. Normally they would have been plastered with overlapping flyers, but during the summer there was little more than leftover staples marking the places where those flyers had once been. College life takes place in a nice little self-contained society, a subset of the real world that offers the type of additional protection and guidance that I think a lot of us in the actual real world wouldn’t mind still having available. Back when I was a student the bulletin boards and flyers everywhere mostly blended into the background noise of life for me, but my adult teacher self now saw them for the opportunities they’re intended to be, and how each one represented a potential catalyst for some college kid changing the trajectory of their life, even slightly.

When I walked into Atwood, the student center, and saw a sign welcoming the class of 2019, I had a moment of “Back to the Future 2”-like disorientation. Atwood was as made over as any other building on campus, but there were still recognizable traces of what it had been before; it was like a glitch in The Matrix had happened, or a dreamworld landscape from “Inception” had been changing while my back was turned, and I just caught a glimpse of changes taking place behind the scenes I wasn’t meant to know about. I was hit with a random memory on the stairway of a winter day when I’d been cutting through Atwood after class and found a larger crowd than usual. Almost before I had time to wonder what was going on, Illinois Senator Paul Simon, who had been on campus for a presidential campaign stop, came through the crowd and shook my hand, calling me by name, which threw me for a few minutes until I realized it was embroidered on the old high school letter jacket I was still wearing. Oddly enough, moments after remembering this, I walked upstairs and saw a timeline of major events posted outside of the main ballroom, including Paul Simon’s visit on Feb. 18, 1988. Now I know the date.

The church bells from downtown rang on the hour to let me know how much time I had left on my parking permit (I had totally forgot they did that and was hit with a mighty nostalgia wave when it happened). I passed through other buildings long enough to recall the feel of them, then decided to make a quick stop at the bookstore (which is in a completely different building now) to buy a sweatshirt, and cut across the quad by the Performing Arts building to get there.

I thought of a group project I’d worked on there on the quad, for a required education course where we learned how to use all kinds of cutting-edge classroom technology like VHS cameras, filmstrip projectors, and microfiche readers. We were assigned to make a short video, and nobody in my group had any idea about what we wanted to do. I volunteered to think up an idea that night so we would have something to do when we met the next day. The rest of the group was appreciative and liked with what I came up with, which made me quietly happy because it felt like it played into my two biggest dreams back then -- getting a job as a teacher, and maybe someday becoming a writer. They both seemed like dreams at the time, since we were constantly being told how poor the job market was in education, and I already had the faintest understanding of what an uphill battle ever trying to be a writer would prove to be. For whatever it was worth, I took a moment on that walk to the bookstore and sent a thought back to my 22-year-old self to tell him that, as difficult as it seemed to ever reach either of those goals (much less both), they would happen someday. There would be a lot of patience and hard work involved, but they would happen. It also occurred to me that to be right where I am in life now would probably match up with the dreams of many of the students currently at my old school, which was a good reminder that regardless of whatever professional challenges or frustrations I ever have to face, I’m really very privileged to be where I am.

I drove through some of the city when I left campus, but resisted making a lot of memory tour stops along the way; in the end, the city was more of an extension of the campus for me and just the setting where life took place. I stuck to the main roads since the memory of so many once reliable shortcuts had evaporated after so many years. I was sad to see the buck-fifty second-run movie theater that had been across Division from all of the downtown bars was gone, and less than surprised to learn the Parkwood 8 theater at the other end of town had evolved into the Parkwood 17. The area around Crossroads Mall had at least 60% more businesses than it used to. I didn’t see the fountains running in Lake George, so I can only hope they were only turned off the day instead of taken out completely.

Before leaving town, I stopped at the gardens down by the river back on the south side, which had been my favorite spot for bike rides during the summer I stayed in St. Cloud to work. It turns out an art fair was being held there that day, so instead of just passing through I parked the car and walked around. Enough of the flowers and plants were already in bloom to make the visit and the slow walk through both the upper and lower gardens worthwhile. All of the people visiting the art fair changed the quietly pastoral atmosphere I had always enjoyed about the place, but they also added a pleasant celebratory feel that capped off the day nicely.

I still had a lot of my playlist to get through for the drive home. The closer I got to the Cities, the more all of my present day thoughts and concerns and tasks started creeping back into my head, but I had some refreshing new perspectives to consider, and felt just a little more connected to a largely forgotten but formative time in my life. And, because of that playlist, even though it’s been a few days since my trip now, listening to the likes Bon Jovi, Poison, Janet Jackson, and the Replacements hasn’t felt so satisfying or relevant in a long, long time.