Homecoming, the College Years

Due to distance and life in general, my college buddies and I only get to see each other once per year. I rode up with my parents and we enjoyed the opportunity to talk in depth about the kids, life, and the OSU football roster, the last part gave Mom an opportunity to sleep for a couple hours while Dad and I fretted over a severe lack of pass rushing defense ends developing behind the two senior starters.

It was great to catch up with my friends when we got to Stillwater. Every year, once reunited, the experience follows a predictable pattern. It starts innocently enough with a round of hugs, obligatory comments about how good everyone looks, and about 30 minutes talking about all the changes in the past year regarding family stuff, home ownership nightmares, and careers. Then we discuss how young the students look, and start reminiscing about the campus and sitting with a handful of people on Wednesday nights requesting songs during Coda Canada and Jason Boland's acoustic set at Eskimo Joe's. Inevitably after a couple beers, the tone changes and we each dig into our arsenal of memories and mercilessly attack each other with a steadily escalating bombardment of embarrassing stories.

Each starts with a grain of truth, but is heavily embellished more and more with each telling. We take this time annually to torture each other with secret information only we know, or fabricate, although sometimes the truth is worse. Words fly freely with testimony about everything from pyromania, stolen pastries, perpetual misplacement of keys and tardiness, orange foam cowboy hats under the staircase, armadillos, disagreements with wrestlers, black eyes, radios broken into doors, obnoxious girlfriends, all of Jamie's loser-boyfriends we ran off for no good reason (she ran off the ones we didn't hate), poor beverage choices regarding quality, quantity and setting, and other terrible errors of judgment. The accused are assumed guilty until proven innocent, and their defense is always sabotaged because the mob is the judge, jury, and executioner. At times someone, moved by feigned compassion, may temporarily assume the position of defense council and seem to side with the accused for a moment. Eventually the fickle counselor will agree that the other side makes a very compelling point, reverse course, and become the most impassioned lobbyist in favor of prosecution and a stiff punishment of largely undeserved character assassination and/or the purchase of the next round. With friends like these, who needs enemies? I hate you guys. Remind me why we're friends?

During this time we rarely call each other by name unless it's preceded by an offensive adjective, as we run the reunion gauntlet of ridiculous yet true or scandalously false memories, often laughing until we almost cry. I will be called a "glorified gardener, always dealing with compost" and the role of the 3 fire protection professionals will be diminished to "squirting water on stuff, which a dalmatian could do." (Both descriptions have been sanitized to protect the guilty.) It's a very humbling experience, and by the time the evening is over we are each fully reminded of our every youthful flaw or mistake, but it's done so by friends we love like siblings- who love us in spite of our flaws, and sometimes because of them. At some point, at least one of us will apologize for being an idiot back in the day and we'll all thank one another for putting up with our foolish, bullheaded nonsense for another year. We'll make each other promise not to tell our kids any of this, or suffer the consequence of subjecting themselves to retaliatory measures. Remember, I have a color scanner and shoebox jammed way back in a spare closet, just bursting with pictures. (Note to Norah and Justin: Don't EVER believe a word ANY of my college friends say about me, it's all LIES and they can't prove anything!)