I still feel like I'm coming home when I get to campus. It's changed a lot since I was in school there. There are at least three new buildings and fewer old buildings (Goodbye, Baldwin Hall with your narrow stairways and musty air--I could easily imagine girls in poodle skirts and short neck scarves in those classrooms. Something about the design, shape and smell spoke to it being from a different era.)
In contrast, visiting my sister's dorm room was like stumbling into a miniature Best Buy. Televisions, DVD players, iPods, and THREE laptops. Not sound all old-school, but when I was at Valpo, laptops were near unheard of. You were lucky if you had a computer at all, and most of us spent our days camped out in the computer labs, praying that our 3.5" floppy disks wouldn't fail on us when we needed them most. (I once lost an entire paper because my boyfriend, now my husband, borrowed my disk and left it in the frigid car overnight). We printed out on dot matrix printers and then wasted another five minutes or so peeling the perforated strips off the side!
But we had so much fun. I loved being a part of a community like that, with friends who became family.
So...in honor of that:
Me, with flat hair and no make-up, at my favorite computer in the computer lab, scrambling to get yet another paper done. (Yeah, I know it's sideways--you know I have issues with this. :) )
Our dorm room, circa sophomore year, 1994.
This is what I miss--everyone hanging out together! (I'm guessing Deb took this photo, which is why she's not in it. I owe most of the photographic evidence of college to her diligence and skill with a camera.)
My baby sister with me on graduation day, 1997. She's now a sophomore at Valpo, and we walked in this same area this weekend to pick up the birthday cake my mom sent through the Guild.
No comments:
Post a Comment