Embracing the well-worn metaphor that life is a road, there are certain mileposts that one can see from a great distance away. As early as second grade I used to marvel that in the unfathomably distant year of 2000 I’d be forty-seven ancient years old. Then there was George Orwell’s 1984. That also seemed a date out of some dystopian future. It, too, came and went even as the world it depicted is only now coming to frightening fruition.
And there are one’s college reunions. I remember visiting the home of a friend the weekend after his father returned from his Harvard 25th with stories to tell. Still in my early teens I considered him pathetically old. Yet last weekend I attended my 50th college reunion. What took me by surprise wasn’t how I felt leading up to occasion or even what transpired in Vermont, but my reaction after it was done. What now? I wondered. The future was past. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as peering over a precipice; but rather that one had reached the crest of something and it was downhill from here.
A 50th reunion is considered a big deal for what I suppose are obvious reasons. It’s a full head-scratching half century since you graduated from college as a young person and into a world as baffling as it was fraught with possibility. Gazing back across the decades is a little like those Apollo astronauts that stared at Earth from the moon. You remember the place warmly but acknowledge that it’s a long way off.
The reunion occurred over three days, running from Thursday through Sunday morning. I missed the first day because I had a previous commitment in New York and also because if things got strange, if I felt utterly alienated, I’d only have to suffer my mistake for forty-eight hours. I originally wanted my wife to join me, at least partially as a buffer if things went wrong. But changed my mind. Few others seemed to be subjecting their spouses to the experience and she would be doing so for me. She knew a bunch of my classmates but I felt that flying solo would offer more flexibility at navigating the weekend’s social landscape.
The weather wasn’t encouraging. It had started to rain about half an hour south of Middlebury and was doing so sullenly as I checked in and got my dorm room. It never occurred to me book a hotel or Airbnb as some others did. I’d obviously have preferred a private bathroom. But my feeling is that if you’re going back to college you want to replicate the experience as authentically as possible.
The evening’s festivities — cocktails, a class photo, dinner — were scheduled at the college’s Breadloaf campus in the mountains outside town. All went well but the misty, cool weather felt as if it put a lid on how much fun you could have. A radiant sunset enlivens the spirit, nowhere more so than in Vermont against the canvas of nature.
Saturday morning I watched the French Open tennis women’s final on my phone — a compelling match even as I realized that TV wasn’t the optimal way to spend one’s reunion — until friends texted me and asked me to join them at a downtown teahouse. My, how both the town and the college have changed and expanded since my era. At the last minute I called a beloved art history professor who invited me over for cocktails that evening.
And then the weather started to improve. It stopped raining. The sun appeared and the sky turned a delicate powder blue, probably because of the smoke from those Canadian wildfires. By the time we marched up the hill at the center of campus to the chapel for convocation behind our “1975” banner, though I suppose some of us hobbled a bit, the temperature had risen what felt like a balmy ten degrees.
You can’t help but judge yourself against your peers at a reunion. When you’re younger it’s about who’s more successful. When you’re older it’s about who’s aging most gracefully. I’ll leave it to others to judge where I fall on that spectrum, though I’d like to think that I disguised my infirmities reasonably well.
At eighty, John Hunisak looks like he’s aged hardly at all. It’s remarkable to think that he was in his twenties when I took his Art History 101 class. He lives in a house on the outskirts of town whose art and furnishings appear as carefully curated as I recall those in his campus housing were in 1971 when I was introduced to the therapeutic benefits of gin and tonics. We discussed the state of opera, one of his passions, and the current Sergeant show at the Metropolitan Museum; in particular the artist’s Venetian paintings.
The professor recalled a recent trip to Venice, shared the name of his hotel, the excellent service he received, and the bartender’s skills. I was reminded of his lectures where he leavened art history with anecdotes such as the cafe on Rome’s Piazza Navona (the site of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, not incidentally) that served the best tartufo in town.
I feared I’d missed cocktail hour back at the college but it was still in full swing on the sweeping lawn outside my dorm when I returned. Energized by the splendid evening and a couple of vodkas — not gin — consumed at my art history professor’s home, as well as a general sense of well-being I walked to dinner with a couple of classmates I hadn’t known that well who quickly felt like intimate friends.
In a best case scenario you’d recapture at a reunion some of the rapture of college, the joyous sense of a world that awaits your contributions with open arms. Something like that happened now. We agreed that the best still lay ahead. We laughed about nothing in particular, had dinner on the student union’s terrace, and retraced our steps to the green where a band was playing and we danced for a couple of uninterrupted hours like deranged freshmen, while surrounded by members of other reunion classes half, no, a third our age.
Will I return for another reunion? A 50th feels pretty definitive. But friends are already talking about a 55th, if only informally and elsewhere. On the other hand, I previously thought it unlikely that I’d be able to recapture the magic of college this late in my career. Somehow, I did.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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