This weekend, my brother called me while he was walking on the Princeton University campus. He was in Princeton for a conference of sorts, and he couldn't resist enjoying the scenery of the place where both he and I spent four years of our lives (my first two overlapped with his time there, which was good, because, as I recall, I spent the better part of my first year as rather a trauma queen, much in need of assistance from an older brother).
While I now live much closer than he does to our "old stomping grounds," he ends up there far more than I do. My interests and friends have changed so much since my college days that, while I certainly have fond memories of a cappella singing groups and beautiful stone buildings and a dorm room that was my haven from the world, I find it hard to connect any of it to my daily life now.
I guess that's mostly how I am in general. It's not that I'm unsentimental. I just tend to get far more caught up in the "what is" and "what will be" than in the "what was." Which makes it good that I kept diaries of my kids' first years. And good that I have yearbooks from high school and college and many, many pictures and tiny videotapes that I never look at, but could, if I'm so busy moving forward that I forget everything that came before.
And when it comes to my Princeton reunion in the spring, will I go, and if I do, what will looking back mean to a forward-thinking person like me?
For now, there are parent-teacher conferences and job hunting and re-filling our refrigerator post-hurricane. So, while I may be forward-thinking, I'll leave thinking as far forward as my reunion for another day.
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