Nothing makes you feel older than returning to your old college campus. I found this out a few weeks ago when I returned to the University of Illinois for the first time in well over a decade. Well, that is not entirely true. I was there for a few hours a year and a half ago with Kim but it was during finals week in December. No one should ever have to experience Champaign in December as everything is simply a different tinge of gray with students walking around stressed and wishing they were anywhere else. Ok, so that is a general description of Champaign at any time of the year but it is even worse in December.
But this time, through a bunch of circumstances that I might get into at some point, I had a few hours by myself on campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in April. Which let me do everything that I wanted to do on campus including realize why I should not be on a campus any more.
Kim usually doesn’t believe my college stories. Mainly because when I returned to campus and had a choice to visit anywhere I wanted my first choice, without any hesitation, was Everitt Lab: the home of Electrical Engineering. Most people would choose the bookstore or their dorm or a bar but no, I literally ran to room 245 where I spent some of the most challenging years of my life. I was thrilled to see that they still had actual blackboards and desks without computer hookups just like I did back in the day when it was just you, a calculator, a notebook, half a dozen pencils and a hope that maybe today would be the day a meteor would slam into the building. I went and checked out which of my professors were still teaching, stopped by the old office that I weaseled my way into my senior year and even stopped by my old lab.
Now I have to start by explaining what my old lab consisted of. The Power Lab is located in the basement of Everitt Lab and consists of motors, engines, a lot of complicated monitors and big red buttons labeled “Emergency”, which if you press turns off the electricity to the entire room. We were next to the fabrication lab, where students would be bathed in yellow light while wearing clean suits and building integrated circuits. We looked at them like they were aliens and they wondered why occasionally they would hear explosions from our lab. For the record, only once did part of a circuit I constructed end up embedded in the ceiling tiles.
Obviously labs should be locked on a Saturday but I walked down anyway and was stunned to find the door open. I walked in and saw probably a dozen students working away at the lab stations. It was possibly the geekiest thing I had ever seen. It was a beautiful day out, a Saturday in April of Mom’s Day weekend and here were these students laboring over their projects. My reaction was not to tell them, “Go outside! There is more to life than circuit designs.” No, I was holding myself back from offering to help. That was me twenty years ago. No question about it.
I could accept that I was older than the students in the lab. They were kids, of course, but at least they were still working in the same lab and probably doing the same projects that I worked on. And it was still the same building with the same professors. It was when I walked the campus that it really hit me. Not only were there new buildings but things like a Chick-Fil-A in the student union, the disappearance of nearly all the bars that I used to go to and the loss of all of the record stores that existed in Campustown. I spent hours every week in those stores and they were all gone. That hurt.
But here was when it really hit me. I went back to my old dorm. I walked in behind a student and her parents, looking like I was maybe some uncle who had latched on at the last second. I wasn’t going in to see a dorm room or anything. I needed to find a trophy in the student lounge. A very particular trophy that twenty years ago was my plan for immortality on campus. A trophy whose story will have to wait for tomorrow.
Wednesday Night Music Club: Thought that I would feature one of the Champaign bands from that same time as they look now. Yeah, Poster Children has aged roughly as well as I have. Still, they were a band that deserved much more airplay than they received.
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