Today I dropped by the back-to-school picnic the local university holds every year. A good chunk of my family work there, and I’ve been going to this annual picnic as long as I can remember. As I grabbed the car keys and headed to meet Mom there, I had the sudden realization that I’ve graduated from college. I’m now older than most of the students at the picnic.
It shouldn’t be such a revelation. I spent four years at a university a couple hundred miles away, I did well in my classes, and in May I stood with others of my class on the football field in boiling black robes while we took turns walking across a stage and getting a fancy folder to hold the diploma they mailed out a few weeks later. Though I wish I could go back and spend another year at my beloved undergraduate program, I know that I’m heading to grad school and that’s going to be wonderful too.
But as I was grabbing the keys, I was thinking about the picnic as it stands in my memory. When I head to this picnic, I expect a bunch of college students milling around while we children of professors gather together and play with the free stuff we picked up from the booths. I expect to see close friends and good acquaintances flocking to the picnic tables where the other kids are. I expect to be in grade school.
And when I get there, so much of it is familiar. There are the kids playing with their new frisbees, the upperclassmen recruiting freshman to their organizations, the professors reconnecting after summers away, and me, hanging around on the edge looking for familiar faces. Except I’m not eight, I’m twenty two. Somehow the college students are younger than me instead of strange older beings of little interest.
The other professors kids I used to play with are not there. One isn’t back from an internship yet, one is studying abroad. Most chose different schools and are already on their way elsewhere to start the fall semester. When did we all grow up and go away? I know I left, I was one of the first. But why didn’t everyone else stay put when I left them there? When I come back, why aren’t we off hunting for sticks to sword fight with, or begging our parents to let us stay longer so we can defeat Darth Vader and save the galaxy?
Time is cruel in it’s inflexibility.