Returning to Roanoke

Returning to Roanoke College with my daughter after having been away from it for thirty eight years was a rather interesting experience. There was this place where I had spent four years of my life, and I could not remember if they were happy or sad years, though certainly what I did there has served me well. Though, I felt comfortable in Roanoke over these days, familiar, not wary. What I had learned at Roanoke College create a central part of who I am and I how I live in the world. For the most part, I can tolerate me. And even sometimes celebrate. I recall sitting in Matthew Wise’s Shakespeare class and laughing uproariously at his reading of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. There was more, but this I remember well: I learned to love Shakespeare under his tutelage. I remember Dr. Deegan looking Mephistophelean with his tipped cigarillo clenched in his teeth as he discussed eighteenth century poetry and prose. I learned about The Spectator there, and about smoking in class. I remember the Senior Seminar in 1969 and Miss Roanoke College rubbing my leg because my kind had suddenly become popular as the zeitgeist shifted and the alternative became acceptable. I was unprepared, despite being a central and unconscious part of the shift.

These men are now gone and/or dead. The only professor still on staff whom I remember is retiring this year. Everyone I talked to today in administrative office was not there when I attended Roanoke College; some of them had not even been yet born. It was as if I existed in a time warp, a stranger in a not at all strange land—I recognized a great deal—but I was certainly in a different time.

There is a coffee house at Roanoke now which reminds me of Greenwich Village and Burlington, Vermont. I think that transformation of Salem, Virginia began in 1969, when I was there. I flatter myself to think that I was part of that transformation. Perhaps even then I was preparing the way for my daughter. I have become more and more a believer in synchronicity, of our own power to shape the universe, though minutely, to our wills. We do have power, but it might also be all illusion. No matter: there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I am jealous that my daughter is at a time in her life when she will attend college. This green feeling makes me think that I enjoyed myself there, because I anticipate for her, her good times. Or maybe my emotions are an indication that I was not happy there, and I now look to her to enjoy the place for both of us. And our visit helped me realize that there is much there to be enjoyed, and much of which to partake. This desire is, for me, totally absurd, and I even know it. And so I am choosing to accept the first explanation, and assuming that the rumors of my misery that I have espoused over the years were self-serving misery, and now it is time to return to a symbolic couch.