deborahjross | Off to nostalgia...

My 40th college reunion is this weekend, so I'm braving the airports and TSA to wend my way to Portland. Undoubtedly to compare gray hairs, wrinkles, and ever-expanding waistlines. I've kept in touch with a few special friends over the years, and am looking forward to seeing them again. Finding out if my feet remember how to folk dance. Sleeping in the dorms (remember to bring ear plugs!) Remembering, perhaps, what my life was like when I had only my own inclinations and obsessions to consider.

When my first marriage fell apart and I felt lost, unanchored, I kept coming back to those years in college. Formative, yes, but also self-formative. I regret, but not too much, not asking more deeply where my passions truly lay. So as I was figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be, ten years ago, what I liked, what I loathed, I remembered long night walks under streetlamps, the smell of grass in rain, strains of Balkan and Israeli music coming from the Student Union, friendships that felt merely circumstantial but turned out to be solid enduring gold, walking through the library stacks when I should have been studying, lying on my back on the lawn one spring twilight, watching the stars come out. Doodling the titles of stories without any idea of what lay within them.

I turned out to be a writer, after all.