Today, we attended on-campus events: a talk about how the student population demographics are changing, from the admissions department, then a guided tour of the campus, mostly new buildings or buildings that have been radically remodeled since our “brightest days.” The radio station, KWAR, once backstage at the old theater building, is now in the new McElroy center, in a much smaller space in the digital age, and a televison studio has been added across the hall.
We had lunch in the new (to us) student meal center. The remodeled and expanded facility is laid out very much like the facility at Western Washington University, where the 1913 Association of Northwest Weaving Guilds conference was held. We opted out of the bus tour of the town, instead joining conversations among fellow alumni. The topics were germane to our common age–retirement, keeping engaged in the things that matter to us, and downsizing and uncluttering 50 years of accumulated “stuff.”
The day ended with a dinner at the banquet room atop the community health center a few blocks from the campus, with continued socialization.
The curious part of a reunion is that, in college, I didn’t associate with a large number of my classmates: Don and I were the only two Physics majors in our class, and we took many of our core liberal arts classes out of sequence with the rest of our class. Also, many of the returning members of our class for this reunion are retired Lutheran ministers, with whom we shared few, if any, classes. I spent most of my non-class time either running the cafeteria dish-washing machine or behind the microphone at the radio station, out of sight. Don was more recognizable as the photographer for the campus newspaper and yearbook. But, we found that we now have much in common with our classmates in retirement, though our life experiences have been very different.
