Speaking of reunions, I got to attend the fourth grade trip to St. Mary’s as a chaperone.  Someone once told me that the trip is a requirement of every fourth grader in Maryland, though I’ve never found documentation for that.  Regardless, I wanted to go on it because I went to St. Mary’s City when I was in 4th grade.

I have three memories of my St. Mary’s City trip:

(1) Visiting a one-room school-house.  The school-house had a few metal lunch pails, and some of the kids got to put their lunches in these pails.  I was not one of the kids chosen.  It is something that has sat in my heart for the last 32 years.

(2) A play where my classmates dressed up like colonial people and read their lines off slips of paper.  I was not given a part and did not get to wear the cool period clothing.

(3) Going to the Renaissance Fair campus afterward even though the fair itself wasn’t running.

So we arrived at St. Mary’s City and started to go around the site.  None of it felt familiar.  I know that I’ve been there because it’s a line in my diary, but I didn’t recognize any of the structures or activities.  I finally took aside the docent and asked about the one-room school-house, but she told me that the children of St. Mary’s were educated at home.  There was no school-house.

What?

I’ve had such strong memories for so many years about a trip that apparently wasn’t this trip.  I mean, I’ve been looking forward to this field trip since the kids were in Kindergarten.  But apparently, that’s not where those memories were from at all.

When I got home, I did some Googling, and I think the one room school-house was actually the Anne Arundel Free School (damn you, AAFS, and your dearth of metal lunch pails!), which makes sense since the fairgrounds for the Renaissance Fair are in the vicinity.  There is also a photo on the site that shows a brick wall similar to the brick wall in my photo.  The twins and I will go investigate and return with an answer soon.

But it made me call into question all of my other elementary school memories.

Luckily, I have photographic proof of one of my favourite memories.  My Kindergarten teacher had a fabric clown, and on your birthday, you could stick your hand in the clown’s ass and pull out a treat.  This is me giving the clown a rectal exam and pulling out a much cherished Crayola bathtub crayon.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Sibyl Moon Games had a post a while back about deciding to leave a game unfinished.

She writes so perfectly: “Creative work is a gamble.  Each time you sit down at your computer – or your notebook, or your easel, or whatever the tools of your specific pursuit may be – then you’re betting you can capture something from your mind and convey it to your audience’s.”

She goes on to admit that part of being a game-maker (or a writer or an artist or an actress or a musician) is also knowing when to walk away and commit your energy elsewhere.  Not every idea will be brought to fruition, and not every project started will be completed.

How do you prioritize where your creative hours go?  Have you ever had to walk away from a project and did doing so create space for other work?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

So there was a reason I asked if you had ever been back to visit an old school, either a campus visit or for a reunion.

When you go to someone else’s reunion, you can’t help but think of your old spaces and reunion opportunities. The ones you’ve attended, and the ones you’ve left in the past.

Working backwards, I have been back to my graduate school campus three times.  One time was for my defense (I moved before I was finished and came back to defend), one time was for a reunion of sorts — a yearly conference that serves as a reunion because so many alum attend, and one time was on our own with the kids.

I’ve been back to my old college three times.  The first came a year after I graduated, when I knew a lot of people still living in Madison.  The next time came years later when my brother was in a play.  And the last time came another year or so after that when I returned with Josh.

I’ve been back to two high school reunions: my 5-year and my 10-year.  I skipped my 20-year.  I have very complicated feelings about it, not sure if it was the right thing or not.  But what’s done is done; you can’t rewind time and attend a reunion.

This is what I’ve noticed.

I love going back to the physical space of my old college and graduate school.  I sort of don’t want to see any of my old friends who haven’t remained in my life since that point and grown with me, so I’m not drawn to the idea of a reunion.  I mean, I like revisiting the memories of them when I’m in the physical space, but I actually think it’s a good thing that I’ve never really coupled revisiting the campus with revisiting people at the same time.

Which is where we get to my theory.  I don’t miss the people.  I mean, I do miss the people, but I don’t miss the people.

I think people show up in your life when you need them, and in that way, Facebook is almost like a clot stopping your body’s natural process of shedding old cells once they’re no longer needed to stop a bleed.  People change, and either they change with us and know our strengths and weaknesses in context, or they change apart from us and only know the old versions of ourselves.

After each stage of life, I’ve tried to hold onto the people who were most important to me.  Sometimes I succeeded, other times they drifted away.  I’ve been grateful for every single person I’ve counted as a friend in each stage of life, and in the moment, those friendships were intense and meaningful and full of love.

And they’re still full of love in the sense that I don’t think energy like that dissipates; it sort of lingers around the corpse of the dead friendship, reminding you that the friendship was once vibrant and animated.  It’s like the soul of the friendship still hangs around those places like ghosts.

So I love going to the physical space of an old school.  And remembering how I felt in that old space, and the people who were important to me, and the things that I learned.  Separate from the campus, I like reconnecting with an old friend in a new context, or catching up via Facebook or a cup of coffee.  But I don’t like the idea of combining them; of attending a reunion at the school and everyone coming back at the same time.  I think it would be too intense for me.  Too confusing.  It would feel too much like resurrection, and in trying to bring something back, perhaps ruining or changing my memories of our first time together.

Then there are people like Josh who couldn’t imagine going back to his campus without seeing all those people.  It was the people who made the place special, and without them, the buildings were just buildings.  I think now that he has broken the seal, returned after a 20+ year absence, he could go back again and again.  But he wanted his first time to be with people.

I think, for me, the thing that becomes special is the place.  And for Josh, the thing that becomes special is the people.

I feel ambivalence towards Facebook.  On one hand, it’s great that it keeps us loosely connected so that you can hold onto more people from each stage of life.  But on the other, you hold onto more people from each stage of life; people who should have floated into the background of your memories instead of popping up front and center in your feed while you’re drinking your coffee.

If we’re all connected via Facebook, what is the point of a reunion?  There’s no reason to catch people up on the here and now.  Is it to simply to reminisce face-to-face?

If that is the case, I almost prefer to go to the campus on my own timeline, returning when I need to seek that physical space again, and not necessarily when a reunion is scheduled.

So that’s what has been going through my brain for the last week or so: why some people want to return more to the space and some people want to return more to the people.  And then in between all of that: how does Facebook change the way we process life when the past is never fully in the past?

A side note: tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.

My parents found me chocolate fudge Yasso bars for my birthday.  They are everything I hoped they’d be and more.  So chocolate-y, so yogurt-y.  I wanted these because they have 6 grams of protein instead of 5 and only 80 calories.  That’s healthy, right?

As Josh says, we are now moving towards an entirely Yasso-based diet.

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I found a new game.  It’s called 1010, and it’s like Tetris for people who don’t like to be rushed.  You have to fit the pieces together to fill a row (which then clears the row but doesn’t drop the pieces) but there are no timers or falling pieces.  You only get three shapes in your queue at a time.  Once you fit them somewhere on the board, you get another three pieces.  I am terrible with this game but love to play it.  I started with the free version but then went for the paid version so I wouldn’t be distracted by ads.  That’s dedication.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “It Takes a Village” (Real Life & Thereafter)
• “MicroblogMondays: What to Say?” (Because I Can’t Have Babies)
• “Leaning in vs. Filling My Cup” (A+ Effort)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kmina is back with a post.  She muses that while she has been able to record parts of her life on Instagram, she has hit a snag at doing the same on her blog.  I love this: “I have changed, I can’t say how, or when, or why, not even when I realised it. It was a subtle change, like getting grey hairs, one does’t get them all at once, but come they do, and the change is permanent, despite the efforts to hide it.”  This grey haired lady says glad that you’re back even if you’re not back.

A Woman My Age has a post about how the topic of adoption rarely comes up on the playground, though she slyly points out: “Women are rarely direct, though, don’t you think?”  And then she segues into an interesting place where it has come up.  We can have the best laid plans of how we are or aren’t going to talk about something.  And then life gets in the way.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post about a trigger that popped up where she least expected it.  She normally finds it difficult to navigate babies and pregnant women, but this time, it was observing an interaction between an 8th grade boy and his parents that caused a lump to form in her throat.  It’s a raw, honest post.

Lastly, No Baby Ruth has a post about a lesson learned from her daughter and how it drives her to be a good example.  Sometimes we need those external reminders of how others see us to motivate us to continue on.  So next time you’re wondering whether you should compliment someone, the answer is “please do.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I have chocolate Yasso bars.  1010 is a fun game.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 29th and June 5th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

So this past weekend, Josh and I drove out to his old college in Iowa.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We drove.  It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.  Hop in the car, zip across to the Midwest, maybe even stop at some other locations and reminisce about our college years in the middle states.

My heart died somewhere near Chicago.

Somewhere near Chicago, my heart died in my chest when I looked at the odometer and realized how much longer we had until we arrived.  I started inwardly wheezing like the Little Engine That Couldn’t.  I know I can’t I know I can’t I know I can’t.

But we did.  And a little after 11 pm Iowa-time (midnight back home), we rolled onto the Grinnell campus and collected our keys and registration.  We unpacked the car and moved ourselves into a dorm room as if we were eighteen-year-olds, giddy to be away from home for the first time.

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We stayed in a dorm.  I realized about five minutes into the experience that I am too old for a dorm.  I am too old for a rickety bed that creaks every time you move.  (How do these kids have sex?)  I am too old to schlep my toiletries down the hall to the lightless bathroom and pee in a metal-walled stall.  I am too old to listen to people talking outside my window or in the hallway at 2 am.  I am like… so so so old.  I couldn’t even. (See, I can now speak like a Millennial.)

I luckily didn’t find the cockroaches until our last morning.

On the second day, I went back to the dorm room for a bit and overheard a conversation in the hallway about a bat that had been flying around our floor the night before.  A bat?  Did someone say a bat?

I tried to get more information about said bat for the rest of our trip, but no one else seemed phased by the bat.  I would be standing in line, chatting with someone, and I’d smile and say, “Hey, what do you know about the bat that was in Younker?”  And they would reply, “Oh, yeah, there was a bat.  What else have you guys been doing today?”

I really wanted to bring it back to the bat.  Because did the person realize there had been a bat?

I am too old for bats.

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It was my first trip to Grinnell.  It is a beautiful campus.  It’s small.  Like it’s really really small; Josh’s college was the size of my high school, and my college could have eaten Josh’s college as an appetizer.

There was a dining hall called Quad that made my heart ache — it looked like the Great Hall in Harry Potter.  And there was a coffeehouse in the basement of a set of dorms where we listened to his old professors play bluegrass music.  There were study nooks everywhere, and a junglegym of carrels in the library.  (In fact, if you Google “study carrel junglegym,” a picture from Grinnell’s library pops up.)

And then there were all the new buildings; a shiny student union, and a beautiful science center, and a sports complex.  It was this mixture of modern and haimish; the sort of place where you wanted to meet someone and hang out on the lawn.  Or read a book, tucked away in a squashy chair in a wood-floored room.

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I guess what struck me the most were the people.  Yes, I was arriving with Josh, this known entity, but I sort of had the sense that if I had shown up without him and attended reunion in his place, everyone would have embraced me in the same way.  They were that kind and friendly.

It was clear how much the people he knew from there loved him, and how much he loved them back.  Many he hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  I loved seeing him so loved.  I know that I should reach for a more descriptive word than loved, but that’s just it: I loved seeing him so happy.  I loved seeing him moved by being in this place with people who are really important to him.  It was so comfortable; so relaxed.  It made for a very easy weekend as well as hard to say goodbye.

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But at the end of the weekend, we had another 15 hour drive home; this time with rain.  A heavy downpour followed us through several states, and it was nerve-wracking going the last 200 miles.  But we made it home and collapsed into bed.

I have a few last thoughts but this post is growing too long, so I’ll end it here and ask if you have been back to your old school — college or otherwise — and whether it was for reunion or simply a visit to the campus.  I have a theory with this one.

Thank you, Dorje, for the photo from dinner.