GOING BACK... AGAIN

Detail from a vintage 1930 Wedgewood plate featuring Princeton University’s Blair Hall... my home for junior and senior years.

Beginning tomorrow, the Missus and I will be making our once-every-five-years pilgrimage to my Alma Mater in order to attend Reunions. It’s a big event, with attendees ranging from doddering old gentlemen from classes in the mid-1930’s to the newly minted graduates of the Class of 2014. Our class falls roughly halfway between those extremes: we’ll be celebrating our fortieth year.

Forty years. Hard to believe, innit? We are now those semi-elderly alumni in their venerable class blazers, the ones we never could imagine ourselves as when we were the new kids on the collegiate block. We’re now the ones with (in some cases, at least) grandchildren almost old enough to start thinking about college themselves. Great Googly Moogly.

There will be plenty of catching up with friends of long standing... getting to know some of the classmates we missed out on knowing when we were undergrads...shooting the breeze... drinking and partying until the wee hours. (We old goats still have our stamina.) It’s why I always look forward to going back to the Best Damned Place of All.

There’s a certain synchronicity that attaches to the weekend, as well. This coming Saturday, our dear friend Houston Steve will celebrate the fiftieth (!) anniversary of his Bar Mitzvah by chanting the haftarah - the prophetical selection that follows the traditional reading from the Torah. Although we won’t be in Atlanta to hear him, the week’s Torah portion is Nasso (“take a census”): what could be more appropriate for the weekend when we will be going back to Old Nassau?