Jasper Memory Lane
I sat in my idling car this past Saturday awaiting a door on the back of an all too familiar college dormitory to be opened by my son. This was the day we would fulfill the final obligations that were set in motion a few months ago once he had made the decision to attend Wake Forest University. The packed car I sat in was about to transfer him from the only residence he had ever known into one that he would come to call home over the course of the next four years. The fact that the street I was on was named Jasper Memory Lane was not lost on me. The 30 year ghostly echo I had experienced at his graduation was a mere shadow of what I was experiencing this time around. We did not attend the same high school but Wake Forest is my Alma Mater. I was the one moving in three decades ago not all that very far from where I was currently waiting. Without too much effort at all, I could even conjure some images that I still carry with me as memories from that all too familiar first day when I also came to call Wake my home. What continues to catch me by surprise is how fast those 30 years have gone by regardless of what actually triggers those memory echoes.
The door I am watching eventually opens and we begin the process of transferring the cargo from the car into his new dwelling. I stepped in the stairwell, walked up a flight of stairs, and turned down the hall toward his room. Almost immediately, I registered a familiar smell that again instantaneously takes me back those 30 years to even more memories of my Freshman dorm on this very campus. The smell was the same. I am not exaggerating. The visual aspects of the hallway and the interior of his room only further solidified this déjà vu experience for me that made the whole day seem surreal. While there were plenty of markers of progress interwoven throughout the campus between all the new facilities that have been built in the years after I graduated and not to mention the literal active renovation of my Junior year dorm just down the same street, there are equally as many markers that didn’t seem all that different at all. When we moved my daughter in three years ago, she was placed into one of those newer dormitory facilities that previously had not existed so the experience was not quite as powerful then as the one I was experiencing this time around.
The mix of memories and emotions were much more than my brain could possibly reconcile. I focused instead on the tasks at hand such as unboxing and preparing his new wireless printer for eventual use but somewhere along the way, I sat down in a chair and happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was floored. It hits me in that moment that those same eyes could have very well been assigned to this exact same room I was now in except they would have been 30 years younger and not behind corrective lenses. I could have been looking into this very same mirror seeing the same person’s reflection. Granted it would have been the 18 year-old version but the fact that it was a possibility was something I just couldn’t shake. I feel certain that had this been my room, I wouldn’t have given a single thought or even considered the possibility then that the 48 year old version of me would also be here someday with his own 18 year old son in tow. I doubt my son will either but that doesn’t change the impact this glance in the mirror has had on me.
This “across the span of time” sensation could easily happen at frankly any place you have spent time in that you return to visit later in life. Your childhood home would be the most obvious one that comes to mind. I acknowledge that I have felt this similar sensation while visiting my parents but this version is just different. Perhaps it is because the nature of college housing is such that it is all temporary anyway. I lived in four different dorms for each one of my college years. In fact, my Sophomore dorm has since been transformed into an anthropological building so it is physically impossible for my son to have a chance to live there. A single school year which equates to roughly 9 months of actual time given the breaks versus an entire childhood is probably just not enough time to solidify the same depth of connection. Perhaps the four years as a whole are long enough to establish a solid connection to the campus but a single room within a given dorm for 9 months may not be. I think it’s potentially more related to the singularity in timing that many of us experience at this same age for what generically can be called “moving into college for the first time” ; however, I can’t say for sure I would have felt this as deeply had we been moving him into his second choice of colleges where I did not attend. It certainly seems like there is something more to it.
The complexity of this echoing effect might simply be because we have the capacity to experience our linear progression of time as overlapping events due to our memories that we carry with us. Those memories often lie dormant within the depository of our brain like a sleeping Smaug on his pile of treasure without us having given them even a second thought. We find ourselves figuratively or even literally on memory lane as I was and the beast awakens with a thunderous roar overwhelming the one who just disturbed his slumber. The power of those images alone might be enough to fell us but they also burn with the heat of the emotion tied to them like Smaug’s fire laden breath. It’s little wonder we feel so small in the wake of all that raw power. If you are familiar with the story of the Hobbit though, there was a small chink in Smaug’s armor that gave a fighting chance against him.
I’ve been preparing a little each day for this event and even made a point to have one last lunch with him at the taco restaurant that inspired this Wootens over Tacos blog concept in the first place just a few days before move-in day. Our conversation focused mostly on the pending life event that was staring us in the face and I tried to impart on him that if nothing else, we could never return to this dynamic as he was about to be changed in ways that could not be undone. Little did I realize it at the time but that was about to be true for the both of us.
