I returned to the dorm. Not as a returning college student. As an alumni. Just visiting.
It seems important to return somewhere, if only to discover the nature of change.
It was an evil trick. There I was, with my friend Stu, struggling with the math. It’s been 23 years since we’d been in front of our college dorm room from freshman year.
No, he corrected me; it was 26 years ago.
I can’t wrap my mind around 26 years. Are you sure? It’s like I don’t have enough fingers and toes for the math.
Stu is still helping me with math, just as he did 26 years ago as my neighbor at George Washington University’s Thurston Hall.
The startling thing was not the number of years that had passed. It was the number of security guards. Three of them at the entry to our old dorm.
Stu and I swung open the doors like we still lived there. We felt all the bravado of being 17 years old again, but the three security guards saw us as being in our 40s, maybe dropping off our kid?
I asked one of the guards if they’d step outside to photograph Stu and me for the scrapbook. They were happy to accommodate. We yukked it up about how we didn’t have security guards back then.
I looked at Stu, bewildered. How did we survive college? We joked and poked fun at the notion of security guards. We couldn’t stop laughing. Then we sobered up and asked the guards what they did.
No one gets past the door without running their identification card three times.
Once is not enough?
No one goes up to their dorm room drunk.
Huh? What did he say? Stu and I were baffled. If that had been the case in our day, there wouldn’t have been any students allowed in.
Stu then had a light-bulb moment. We had a security guard in this building way back then. “Don’t you remember our security guy?” No, I couldn’t dredge it out of my fog bank.
Stu tried to jog my memory, “the seeeecuurityyy (he drags out this word) guy” was the guy that did the beer runs for everyone for a fiver.
Oh, yeah? I never drank beer.
But I did certainly do my share of partying, no claiming innocence here. Just not beer.
Still baffled, Stu and I moseyed on to other nostalgic places. The grass hangout is now a sculpture garden. The hospital moved from the left side of the road to the right.
Stu and I couldn’t figure that out and it’s not that we remembered it wrong.
I never went to the hospital, no beer, and no security guards.
The changes were not small. They were not cosmetic. We looked into each other’s eyes. I saw the lovable guy. A friend who could be counted on, no matter what. He was just as he had been.
But we were standing in what felt like a new world. Washington, D.C., was not what we remembered. Thurston Hall was part of the tightened security we saw everywhere in Washington, D.C.
We drove around in Stu’s luxury vehicle, not the beater from college days. The Capitol is barricaded. Guards are everywhere, at every monument on every corner, by every federal building. There are lots of federal buildings in D.C.
This did not reflect what we had become. Yet here we were standing in the new world. One that pretended it did not fear terrorism. But fearful it was. It made everything look so scary.
We weren’t laughing any more. Our hearts were in our throats. The loss of freedom in our nation’s capital was glaring at us everywhere we looked.
I didn’t feel protected. I didn’t feel safer. I just felt a loss of something so precious, and it wasn’t my youth.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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