Life and Island Times – May 19, 2016

Alma Mater

It had been 16 years since Marlow had been on the campus of his alma mater. Before that it was 1996, 1992, and 1991 then the big one in 1987 when he and the X had dropped off their #1, who had been born there in ’69 while he was a student.

After he graduated in ‘71, it had been nourishing and kind intellectually, spiritually and emotionally to Marlow and his family for many years as they rambled the planet during his US Navy career.

Graduation 2016 had occurred Saturday, so the campus was thinning out on Monday. It took him an hour and half to slowly walk the campus and get a feel for the new it.

Things had changed.

The landscaping was magnificent – far more beautiful, varied and lush than he remembered. The manscaping of new dormitories, centers for this and that, sports stadia were on a scale utterly incomprehensible to him. All this worked its subtle charm on him as it had 49 years ago when he first saw the campus.

Sadly, 26 years ago they had started slowly to part ways. It took him a while this day to see why through all the surface beauty.

“It’s business as usual.” Marlow told himself, downplaying his first return to the place. It wasn’t just old hat, it was a new hat and an expensive one, so to speak.

It was different. Not just in the literal sense of new buildings added/renovated since he graduated. The culture had changed and dramatically so. The place had more staff, administration buildings, security guards, and just plain stuff everywhere.

What he felt was challenging. It did not recolor his memories of his undergraduate years but highlighted the changes he was seeing. The nostalgia had faded long ago, but the closeness to the place he used to feel was now not to the place but to the people he had encountered while there.

What he had experienced was fulfilling. What he saw now was not.

The desire to give back was no longer there for a host of reasons. His mentors were all gone. Their replacements and subalterns had serially insulted him and his family at several crucial times.

It had become wealthy, yet was quietly ashamed of it but did nothing to return to its former path: being an affordable elite educational institution for American Catholics. It was full of entitled kids who were throwing away ten of thousands of dollars of stuff in the dormitory dumpsters.

The school of Fathers Sorin and Hesburgh and graduates like Thomas Dooley and Knute Rockne had finally and irrevocably become in his eyes, heart and mind – Notre Disney.

Copyright From My Isle Seat © 2016