For years I’ve thought how great it would be to someday live near my college friends again. I went to a school with people who came from all over, and after graduation we scattered as far as if we’d been sprung from a milkweed pod. My dream has been of us all ending up in the same retirement community. Those places seem to be similar to campuses, with residents living close together and probably getting a tight buzz on and jigging each other every chance they get, just like at school.
If you can’t be young again, it’d at least feel good to be around friends who knew you when you were and who still see that person in your face. Must be how it is to spend your senior years in your hometown, but so few people do anymore. For lots of us, the only place where we can count on seeing numerous pals from our grass-green days is during our college class reunions.
At those gatherings it’s obvious that we miss not only each other but the place, appreciating it in a way we didn’t when we were busting to get out into the wider world that we assumed was going to be so much more fascinating. Well, now we’ve seen that world, and most of it doesn’t come close to being as beautiful and agreeably familiar as the old alma mater.
It’s like it’s taken being away for years for us to fully know it, and we want back in. “Don’t you wish you could just get a room here?” a classmate asked me at one reunion, and I told him I did, especially since this time around there would be no odious Papers Due.
Possible solutions for this ongoing itch stayed in the fuzzy realm of wishful thinking until I read about a national trend of entire housing subdivisions being built specifically for the alumni of certain schools. The developments constructed so far have been connected to universities known for their monster sports programs, and located mere miles away from the mothership, with shuttle service to the games so you can still root for the team even if you’re three- fifths dead.
Although the concept is currently just being applied to these epicenters of rah-rah boosterism, I think it could be adapted successfully for us graduates of small liberal arts colleges whose zeal is just as strong even if it isn’t based on pigskin. Of course, what we’d require in a back-to-college community might differ in a few radical ways from what they’re building for alums who dress in their school colors from tip to toe and grunt un-words like Uga! Uga! at their alma mater’s football games.
The development underway for University of Georgia alums, called The Georgia Club, is centered around a golf course and club house decorated with sculptures of mascot Uga the bulldog. We’d be down with having a golf course but would require something more along the lines of an opium den than a dog house for the club decor. You can also forget the golf shop stocked with gizmos in school colors. A lot of us are a little vague on what exactly the school colors are, anyway, and would prefer to have a combo music store and head shop. There still was one in the college center when I was a student, although the music was in records then, and it actually had bongs displayed in the window. After we left they stripped it, ditched the bongs and installed computers.
Our alum community could combine the best of what we enjoyed at school that doesn’t exist anymore with the improvements that came along later. It’d be like college again, only better! We may have had a head shop, but kids today have coffee bars all over the place, including, amazingly enough, in the library, while we had to make do with machine-squirted dreck in Styrofoam that tasted like it’d been drained from a tarred roof.
Multiple locations for coffee are a must, with hashish on the menu for that continental touch. We’ll also need more than one bar, because providing opportunities for conversation is key — talk was the pigskin we tossed around.
The Georgia Club is planning a building modeled after the university’s Phi Kappa Hall. Our candidate for duplication should be the neo-Gothic stronghold where the religion of aesthetics is preached in the form of art history. We’d need a shuttle to the campus gallery instead of any sports stadium. The whole steeped-in-beauty trip is crucial to those of us whose undergraduate experience was just that.
As for the community’s social fabric, you cannot get a bunch of us living together again and not have some slipping around. We would just do it automatically, like talk, so I propose that people keep the spouse they move in with, but get to add a supplemental alumnus/alumna mate. The place isn’t the only thing that the passage of years has helped us appreciate and know. Go Team!
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2004.
