The students are back full force. Lines down every aisle at the grocery store! People in academic gowns teeming the city centre! Bicycle traffic jams!
One of the more interesting aspects of life in this college town is the cyclical infusion of youth. Particularly at the start of the academic year, the anxiety and excitement are palpable – and it is in fact endearing.
The only thing I have to compare is Olympia in the late eighties and early nineties, with flakey hippies and jaded hipsters wandering around in a haphazard fashion. The vague impressions I have left of that campus are all about looming modern concrete buildings, open spaces, enroaching forest. I’m sure there were occasional crowds for protests or performances, but there was never the overwhelming swarm of Cambridge in term time – nor the manifest sense of optimism.
Fifteen years ago I was sitting on a bench at Evergreen having a gloomy conversation with James when this very tall boy in a rugby shirt wandered over and joined us. It was his housemate though they barely knew each other – a boy named Byron, who didn’t have much to say.
We were all twenty-one, but my companions were still trailing through their undergraduate studies in a casual and what I would have then characterized as irritating manner. They could afford to – they didn’t have a small child to look after. It was my first day of graduate school, and I was grimly determined to acquire the credentials necessary to find a decent job.
On that day Byron was just back from a year in Spain studying literature. How did he manage to switch to science at all, let alone do a PhD in mathematics without any formal background? I don’t know, but I’ve found the whole thing quite entertaining.
The fact that we’re all three still close friends is astonishing; who would have guessed that of such a fractious, melancholy, scandalous crew?
I certainly never would have predicted it, let alone how quickly I abandoned my first career, or that we would all wander so far from the Pacific Northwest – having genius adventures and glorious fun along the way.