Last night I knew for sure what I had suspected for some time. I am aging - perish the thought!- and there are times now, when I feel like a square peg in a round hole.
I went with my significant other to watch our daughter perform at the student union of a Big-10 university. It had been years since I had been in a student union - the last time being for a week-long graduate class but it was in the summer, when the student population was greatly diminished.
We walked in at about 4:30, when most classes had concluded for the day and, being a Friday, the students were out in full force, celebrating the end of a class week. The place was full with eighteen, nineteen, twenty-something-year-olds. Their faces were unlined, their voices held the celebratory sounds of party-hearty and they crammed chair after chair around tables to accommodate the arrival of yet another friend. It brought back pleasant memories to the two of us about days of yore, when we were in that same space at another Big-10 university.
We found a table where we had a good line of sight to enjoy our daughter and her quartet's performance, then settled in with beverages, a big bag of popcorn, taking in the sights and sounds of a typical TGIF setting. We teased each other about being old enough to be many of the surrounding students' grandparents, our gray hair, etc. I excused myself to find the rest room and, upon entering, came face-to-face with a full length mirror. Big mistake! What stared back at me was an anthropological dinosaur from the 1970's for sure! Old-fashioned hair style, nylon warm-up suit - colored 1970's green, cloddy running shoes - you get the idea. Nothing hip about this granny. I went back to the table and told my significant other that I was certain I was the square peg in the round hole. We laughed together, an unspoken understanding of what the other felt, and the familiarity felt good. Then our daughter began to sing and we forgot that we were oldsters. We just enjoyed the fabulous music, the high energy around us, and somewhere, deep in our sub-consciousness, traveled back almost forty years. For two hours we were in college once again.
Ah, memories!
