Maybe You Can Go Home Again, Or At Least Drive By

On my recent trip back to Cincinnati I was able to carve off several days to spend with my brother Eric and his girlfriend Linda and their family in Indianapolis.  The day after Thanksgiving they dragged me down to Franklin to visit our alma mater, Franklin College. It was a very pleasant experience, but also, not surprisingly, a bittersweet one (which seemed to fit the general mood of the trip).  I had not stepped foot on the campus in twenty-six years, since the time when I left there (I was teaching there while I finished my dissertation) and moved south to Atlanta for the job at Georgia Perimeter (then DeKalb) College.  Truthfully, upon reflection, I think I carried more anger directed at the school than I realized, and maybe the trip there over the break helped me put some of it to bed.  There was a job opening at the school at the time and even though I had been teaching there for three years Franklin didn't even consider me for the position, which caused more than a bit of stress for our little family (my son, Gary, was just turning three at the time, and Brenda and I were poor as church mice).  As it turns out it was all for the best, and I can't believe I would have had anything near the opportunities, and the career, if I had stayed there. That said, I think it bothered me more than I ever was able to articulate. My brother asked if I was being flooded with memories, and I think I disappointed him a bit when I said replied "only partially."  After graduating I went to graduate school and spent twice as much time at UC pursuing my doctorate, but then also came back to Franklin and taught for three years, so I overlaid a lot of the undergraduate memories.  Most of my most lucid memories related to teaching there.  I think it was appropriate that the college was closed for the day, because it served as a fitting metaphor for the almost unbridgeable distance I felt; the unbearable lightness of being.

The statue of Ben Franklin (who had nothing at all to do with the school, obviously) and Old Main, where I both had, and taught, most of my classes. I think Franklin is where I learned to think, and in the classic small liberal arts college approach, to read extraordinary books and to grapple with great questions.  Considering my proclivity to have my students read the Ramayana or the Shahnameh or Winesburg, Ohio or Remembrance of Things Past, I have a little corner of the Champlain College Core Curriculum which will always be Franklin College.

Being the day after Thanksgiving the campus was appropriately empty.  My ex-wife Brenda and I met at Franklin and she used to cross to the other parallel sidewalk when she saw me because her sorority sisters had warned her about "Scary Gary." When I was taking classes there I think the total student population was around 550 students (it's now doubled) so the quiet seemed familiar.

Barnes Hall, where I took a ton of classes during my failed pre-Med days.  I think I received, and doubtless earned, a 9 on my last Organic Chemistry test (and not our of 10) before switching majors.

The Franklin College Chapel, which formed one of the more elegaic and bittersweet moments.  Brenda and I were married at the Chapel, which I remember as a blisteringly hot, but wonderfully happy, July day.

The famous Franklin College wellhouse.  The legend at the time was that you were not really an undergraduate at the school until you kissed someone in the wellhouse, although far more profound acts of depravity were carried out there with regularity.  I love authentic, organic college traditions.  At Champlain we keep "creating" traditions, which is why they never stick.

The building that contained the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which, sadly, no longer exists.  I lived there for four years, and I think I held every conceivable office. My friends from later stretches of my life are always stunned that I was in a fraternity.

Yours truly stopping to talk with Ben Franklin, a statue that did not exist when I attended the school.  He thought my arguments were persuasive, and was pleased that I get up so early.