Our current excursion began almost 4 months ago with my 50th Bates College reunion. When I wrote about that, I mentioned that I enjoyed hanging out with a small cohort of classmates with whom I’d spent a lot of time hanging out while we were students 50 to 54 years earlier. One of those classmates is my friend Martha.
During my freshman year at Bates, I lived with 11 other guys on the 3rd floor of the middle section of Smith Hall, a men’s dormitory with three sections – South, Middle, and North – each section containing 4 floors, each floor with 4 two-room triple suites opening from a central lobby/stairway landing, plus 1 shared bathroom and a shower.
We were, at that point in our lives, learning a lot of things and of course not all of those things had to do with scholastic activities or academics. My classmates and I were in Junior High for the Summer of Love, Woodstock happened between 9th and 10th grades, and we (the males, anyway) were the last 18-year-olds to receive lottery numbers for the draft during the Vietnam War. Arriving on campus in our late teens, by now mostly accustomed to the significant hormonal changes we’d just undergone and eager to experiment, newly eligible to vote as well as to drink alcohol, most of us were for the first time in our lives suddenly able (and obligated) to make consequential choices and decisions away from the close observation of our parents. It was pretty cool.
Bates was, from its inception, a co-ed college. It has never had fraternities or sororities. It was small – about 1,200 students total – and almost everybody lived on campus. There was one common dining hall, so eventually nearly everyone there became at least a familiar face, if not a friend or acquaintance.
At some point during that first year, my floor-mates, roommates and I found that we had managed to create on Smith-Middle-3rd Floor an environment in which a number of people became fairly comfortable hanging out. How we met each of these people, and which of us may have brought them to the fold, these things are lost in my memory (along with a lot of what happened back then – learning to deal with my newfound independence took me a little more time than it could have, let’s say). Martha, as well as her roommate Polly, were primary members of this crew and I have many fond memories of the time we spent together back then, learning to be adults.
Anyway, as Martha and I were hanging out again at our 50th Reunion, 54 years later, I learned that she, who I knew had come to Bates from Virginia near Washington DC, has been living for some years in Pennsylvania. Oh? We’re going to be in Philadelphia at the beginning of October. Are you anywhere near there? Could we stop and say hello?
The event we’re going to is actually in King of Prussia PA, an “edge city” on the west side of Metropolitan Philadelphia. Martha lives in a town just a couple of miles further west, and, yes, please stop by!
Martha shares her townhouse with her son Andy, who is finishing a degree in Psychology. Their neighborhood had room for us to park and a lenient HOA, so we met up there. We enjoyed meeting Andy. He is an unabashed, self-described nerd, so he and I hit it off pretty well. He has some serious computer skills and an amazing basement workshop with multiple 3D printers. I was blown away! After the workshop tour, Martha and Andy brought us to dinner at an awesome Italian restaurant. After dinner, Andy went back to his work, leaving us 3 seniors to ourselves in the living room. Sitting on the couch and chatting with Martha (reminding me very much of Smith-Middle-3rd floor), we talked about Bates and people we knew from there, a little bit about politics, a lot about travel, moving on to our families, books and authors we liked, pretty much anything that came up. It was fun, relaxing, and familiar.