This term, I arrived on campus early, which is probably — potential employers, please stop reading here — one of only a handful of times I’ve ever been early to anything in my life.
After a logistical housing nightmare involving unfinished renovations in the apartment my roommates and I planned on leasing, we temporarily moved to an off-campus house. The property is objectively in poor shape — there’s a mildew smell coming from the basement, our fridge doesn’t get cold enough and our front door doesn’t even work. Yet, I have a pathetic sort of nostalgia for it, because it’s the house that hosted the first real college party I ever went to.
Even though it’s such a trivial coincidence, I feel a cutting mix of emotions when I remember that my bedroom is two stories above where an 18-year-old Tess Bowler once pushed through a crowd of sweaty strangers, trying to desperately hide the fact that all she wanted was to make some friends. That emotional response is what I think it would feel like for satisfaction to have teeth, a gnawing feeling of being happy with where you are, all the while wishing you could experience the beginning all over again.
One of my first days back in Hanover this term, I walked into CVS to get one thing or another and paused in one of the aisles. I didn’t need anything in that particular section but it made me remember the time when I cluelessly walked up and down those same aisles, not having familiarized myself with the layout — after the aforementioned “first ever college party.” Trailing behind me were three people I had met earlier in the night, also freshmen and unacquainted with the details of the convenience store.
How many times do you think you’ve been to the CVS in Hanover throughout your Dartmouth career? As funny as it sounds, it feels like you could put together the pieces of my Dartmouth narrative from CVS vignettes. Freshman year you go with a group of people; you don’t spend time with those people anymore, though you say “hi” when you see them around. You walk up and down the aisles by yourself one day, with friends another, and later, different friends, used-to-be strangers. You go to CVS freshman year, you go back senior year, and a hundred times in between, even you are not the same person.
At a campus so small, in this town the size of a postage stamp, it’s hard to avoid the sandtrap of nostalgia, especially when you’re running into it every day on the street or in the house you live in. But, I think that’s okay. We should allow ourselves to be confronted with our memories from our time at Dartmouth, while we still have the time to change things about our experience, to make them better.
This week in Mirror, several new writers make their debut. One explores how students express themselves through their water bottles and another reports on Dartmouth Generations, a club that seeks to build a connection between students and older adults in the upper valley. We also get the scoop on people who regularly attend Collis Trivia, and another writer investigates what students do with left behind objects in furnished off-campus houses. In light of Commencement speaker nominations concluding this past Monday, two writers report on the process behind choosing who speaks at graduation. And, to celebrate our new writers, we welcome you to get to know our latest additions to the Mirror team through a special edition of “Mirror Asks.”
Rock ’n roll, Mirror — welcome to a new year!
