In the recurring theme department, in the aftermath of every reunion I’ve attended I feel that I have horribly mismanaged my time and missed many opportunities. I think this is a manifestation of my chronic FMS syndrome (Fear of Missing Something). The critique goes like this:
- For the events I do attend, I should’ve been more chatty and outgoing to catch up with more folks.
- For the events I do not attend, well… clearly that is where the magic would have happened if only I had been there!
This time I did well on the former – a social butterfly I was, but a big FAIL on the latter, as I shall describe.
I busted my ass to get to Tony’s a day sooner than I needed to. The first day on the schedule was Thursday, so I had it in my head as the day to be there, but in fact the only event of Thursday was an evening kick-off cocktail party, and Tony wasn’t making the 90 minute drive to attend. I learned later from friends that it was entirely missable. The schedule was serious when describing it as having “light hor’dourves” … that meant cheesy little miniature sandos. Anyway, I ended up having a whole day to sit around and NOT drive anywhere, and watch the Giants beat Atlanta in Game 1 – woohoo!
Thursday
I get rolled out of bed at 7:30 for the hour-plus drive to Cambridge. As a former roommate, Tony knows to stay clear as I come to consciousness too early in the day.
- park at the Oxford St Garage (Class o’ 70 parks free!),
- walk all the way across campus to Holyoke Center to register ($260 – yikes!)
- Tony went to listen to the President’s address, I (tried to) attend a couple of classes.
- three of the four classes I tried to audit were empty rooms (MWF classes on the Friday before Columbus Day)
- I went to the new Sackler Art Museum which was really excellent. Doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside … amazing art. It’s not everywhere you can stick your face eight inches away from a Van Gogh or a 15th century master to check the brushstrokes!
- lunched in the Lowell House Dining Hall, my happy home for two years oh so long ago. Much nicer now, many more food options, and many more than the 0% women we had at the time – both very good improvements!
- presentation of the Class Survey results in the Science Center. The survey was very entertaining, but the presentation was kind of a f–up, nobody could operate the presentation equipment, and I seem to have lost the ability to be comfortable in those tiny, narrow lecture hall seats.
- dinner and movie that night. The movie was about a Harvard-Yale football game in our era. I didn’t have much hope from it, but it turned out to be excellent.
- back to Fall River and beddie bye.
Saturday
I spent a couple of hours re-arranging my van based to cure annoyances of the trip eastward. Mostly I wanted to be make it easer to get to the box containing my vast collection of maps, so I shifted things around a bit. But the bike did not want to play nice. All of the boxes and the bike just would not go back in until I had spent about 45 minutes of trying different configurations.
Then time to go off to visit another classmate, East Side Johnny. At registration, I had paid the $85 to attend tonight’s dinner dance (7pm-midnight). Johnny was going to the Harvard-Cornell football game at noon, then the plan was that he would have a bbq after the game, then I would stumble off to the dinner dance. That was my plan anyway, turns out that Johnny’s plan shifted into something different.
I got there about 3pm, in time to meet his lovely daughter Nell before she escaped Dad’s friends for the rest of the weekend (good call Nell :). John got home, and one thing led (too slowly) to another, and to cut to the chase, the bbq didn’t really start till about 8pm, and we got really drunk and stoned and I completely, utterly missed my $85 event. The bbq was a very excellent thing in itself, but we coulda had that another day and I could’ve either connected with more classmates or saved $85. These things happen when I enter the Johnny zone.
Sunday,Monday,Tuesday
Drive back to Fall River, and hang with Tony and Joyce for the next three days … it’s just so easy!
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