I started college a quarter early in the summer of 1981. Because I had been indecisive about choosing between Bowling Green and Ohio State, I was forced to start a quarter earlier than the other freshmen students to insure that I had a place in the dorms. The rub was that I had to find my own accommodations for the summer quarter. Luckily uncle Ted was living in Columbus while working at mental heath facilities so I had a place to stay.
I remember meeting my first college buddy and future roommate, Britt, at the orientation a few weeks before the summer quarter started. He was a farm boy from Ashtabula County. I remember the ride from Lucasville up Route 23 to Ted's apartment in Columbus and parting with my parents and my childhood. I remember uncle Ted dropping me off at the corner of Woodruff and College on my first day of class and telling me to enjoy every moment and that he would love to be in college again. I remember seeing my wife for the first time as she and her mother stood in the elevator of Lincoln Tower. She was so young and pretty and eager to start her new life. I would meet her again in a few weeks at a toga party on October 3, 1981.
It seems that the best things in my life have been related to or connected with a college campus. Undergraduate, graduate and professor. I know how wonderful the memory of a college campus can be and it fills me with a deep sadness to know that those memories will be tainted for so many people because of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Unfortunately I have little contact with my friends and roommates from my undergraduate days at OSU, but this gives me full license to imagine what they may be doing now. In my daydreams they have thickening waists and thinning hair. In my memories they will be young forever, but in my imagination and in reality they are middle-aged. They are not forever young in reality. Thank God.
Some memories are of my roommate Chris. We would talk across the empty darkness between our bunks all night until sleep took one of us and we would both wake up the next morning tired. I have no idea what we talked about then but it means the world to me now. Chris was a first generation Pole from Cleveland and a walking encyclopedia of sports trivia. I need to be able to believe that he is in Cleveland today giving stock tips to other middle aged Browns fans.
Virginia Tech is technically in Appalachia but as those of us who have been to college know, all of these campuses really exist in a separate dimension. This magic realm has only the barest connection to the physics of the real world. Time stands still and accelerates. Life long friendships can exist for a mere few hours. Old men and women can be young adults all their lives and a teenager can be a sage. Death will come for all of us so that life may remain important but it would be sophomoric to say that the deaths caused by the tragedy at Virginia Tech are not exceptionally horrible. When a human being takes another human being's life it is always worse regardless of the circumstance, but this is worse than that.
This tragedy is worse if for nothing more than it tore a hole between what separates this magical world and reality and let the real world trespass into a place where it does not belong.
