I don’t have much allegiance to Cornell University as a school. I consider the blame for my lack of academic achievement to be mutual, though, really it’s a sixty-forty situation with the burden resting on me. Eh, seventy-thirty.
The one thing I have from my Cornell days, though, is my fraternity. Yes, I was a frat boy (you can read about me and my bros here). When you’re a frat boy, you have a place to come back to when you want to visit your college and you know that you’ll see some familiar faces. A lot of the people that I know from my fraternity weren’t even there when I was a student but we got to know each other just because we were part of the same fraternity.
It’s funny how that happens. The mildest criticisms of fraternities are that you’re just buying friends or that it’s just a house. And yet, every time I go back, the guys that I meet remind me of the guys I hung out with when I was there. I can’t explain it but it’s cool.
I’ve thought about Cornell reunions recently for a few reasons. The first is that I went up last year for Homecoming and I’m in a much different place now than I was then. I was also up at Cornell for a reunion the week before my father died in 2009.
I thought about that 2009 trip this past June on the ninth anniversary of my father’s death. In retrospect it feels selfish that I went. My father was continuing his trip to England, which I joined him on for the first week and a half. But at the time, I felt like he was doing well and we would have more time together, so, I came back to the states. I just needed to make sure that he made it home from England. I told him to call me when he touched down. He was due to land the first day that I was in Ithaca.
I took a bus to Ithaca from New York. I stayed at this busted hotel down the street from my fraternity house that was perfect for the weekend. I met up with some friends. I met their spouses and, in some cases, their children. I hit some bars. It was going to be a good weekend.
But when it came time for my dad to call, he didn’t. An hour passed. I kept calling. No answer. I started to panic. I stood outside my friend’s rented Collegetown house, making calls and frantically smoking Came Lights. Through several phone calls between a friend in Rochester and the airline, we tracked him down. My friend picked him up and all was well. I went back to tenth reunion revelry and the following week, my father had his stroke.
Last October I went up to Cornell for Homecoming basically because a friend suggested it and I had nothing better to do. When I agreed to go I was still reeling from getting dumped, I was unemployed, and I was generally not doing so well.
My friends and I stayed in an Air B ‘n B downtown and I took full advantage of frat life. I played pong again. I went out to bars. I ate the late night drunk food, Hot Truck (it’s like a pizza sandwich on french bread, second only to the garbage plate).
After a Homecoming night of drinking like a college student, I wandered down to the Ithaca Commons to watch some baseball and my friend met me down there before we went back to our place. “Hey, man, you’re kind of slurring,” he said.
“Yeah? Am I alright?”
“Yeah, you’re just slurring, that’s all.”
It was time to go home. We got Hot Truck (again) and went home to watch Netflix before I passed out.
I’m obviously not writing about these particular trips because they’re happy. There are other visits without the dead parents or depressed binge drinking. I’m writing about them because they’re pivotal. I was in this one place at these moments in my life that I still think about.
Homecoming is coming up again and I’m not going to go. It’s not just because I’m busier this year than I was last year. I think it’s because the last time I went, I realized that I keep going back to recapture something, that feeling of college freedom.
When I graduated in 1999, I stuck around for the reunion weekend after graduation. I met a woman there who was the wife of an alum. She was pregnant. In 2009, I saw her again, this time with her ten year old boy. Last October, I told several of the guys that I pledged in 1996 to which they said, “That’s the year I was born!” And those were the seniors. One time my father told me, “Well, time keeps moving forward, whether we want it to or not.”
You can’t ever really go back, you can only visit. But soon, I might not even be able to do that anymore.
My fraternity has been suspended from school for four years. It will be very difficult to start everything back up when the suspension is over. I don’t have all the details but it’s basically because of our pledge program (and I thank God that it was our pledge program). When I was a pledge I got yelled at, drank straight Red Hot, and stripped to my underwear and covered myself in Crisco and ran through campus. That stuff doesn’t fly anymore. Nothing even close to it.
But I loved that I did it.
