We must go through Dartmouth twice - once in the four years we're given here in Hanover, another time over the rest of our lives. The memories I have of my already-alma mater are rich - deep remembrances that have human significance. I remember conversations set in front of events, moments that occurred while taking part in something, well, something Dartmouth.
Moments like the one freshman year, when Jules and I had one of our water fights, come to mind. After a good 10 minutes of stalking, Jules had finally caught me unawares on the common room couch on the first floor of Andres Hall in the East Wheelock cluster. Slowly, quietly, carefully she approached the third-floor banister overlooking the lounge with a wastepaper basket full of cold water.
I remember the dowsing, but I don't think it was the water I'll remember in years to come. Of the whole water fight, I now remember most the short talk we had between skirmishes. We talked about what we were to do with our lives after college.
"Tig, I really don't know!" Jules complained. "The people - the great people, the best people - already know what they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives. And they're already doing it."
"No, Jules," I said. In actuality, I guess I partially believed her. "Sure a few tennis players have been playing since they were six. So maybe a couple artists have been craving the arts since they were finger-painting, but those are the exceptions, Jules, not the rules."
"And I'm not exceptional," Jules concluded.
"Maybe you're not," I said. "But I doubt that. And even if you were, it's not because you didn't know what it was you'd be doing for the rest of your life as a freshman in college."
That short dialogue, perpetrated just before we went to bed, will always stay with me. I hope.
I remember Jules and I having a talk in my room a year later.
"Why is it that whenever someone returns my affections, I begin to lose those affections?"
"Who now, Jules?"
"Doesn't matter, answer the question."
"Okay, give me a minute," I said. I had no idea. "Maybe it's the old Groucho Marx syndrome."
She looked at me perplexed.
"Yeah, don't you remember the old Marx line, 'I'd never want to be in a club that would accept me as a member'?"
"Oh."
"No really, it's true. Once someone accepts you, it's kind of like saying, we acknowledge that we are no better. And that can be kind of disappointing."
"Well I'm disappointed," Jules said.
"In you or in him?"
"I don't know."
Just a week ago, Jules and I sat out at the corner of Main Street and Wheelock. We'd met four years before, on our freshman trip. We had lived on the same floor of various dorms and houses for three of those years. It was a sunny day that last Monday. We were setting down on the steps just across from the Hanover Inn. It was warm.
And we were silent together.
There was no reason, then, for me to think I'd remember these short, quiet exchanges. It was rather simple - a comfortable, rich silence. But the profundity of it was striking. I won't forget it. Or at least I shouldn't. Will I someday recount this story to some fellow '93: "Hey, remember when we used to have water fights? Now that was fun!"
I guess it's silly to worry which things I'll recall and which I'll forget. I can't go through life - or through Dartmouth, for that matter - always thinking of which things I must place in permanent memory.
In 30 years, I'll be recounting these stories to my fellow alumni under a white tent between Parkhurst and McNutt. "Remember going rope swinging?!" I'll shout boisterously, slapping 50-year-old Jules' back. "And that time we had that great water fight?!" Again, I'll slap her back. "Those were the days, Jules!"
But lurking in the back of my mind, not quite in the conscious part, but in the part that instigates my nebulous love for Dartmouth College, will be those memories of the late-night conversations, the importantly awkward, telling moments and even the fondness for humorous tidbits I'd forgotten.
