Trippy tree

It isn’t often that we meet someone from our long-ago past, but such was the case a couple weeks ago, when I found myself sitting at lunch next to a woman I went to college with. When we looked at one another, we acknowledged the other looked familiar, and then went through the usual litany: Where did you work? Where did you live?

And then, one of us, me, I think, said:  You didn’t go to Syracuse University, did you?

She did. At the very same time I did. And we lived in the very same apartment-dorm.

Well, of course, that was a miraculous thing, the Universe did, in bringing us together. Because I hadn’t been sitting next to her at first. But two more women arrived at our lunch and I gave up my seat so they could sit together, and moved to a different table, right smack dab next to this fellow Syracuse alum. Whom I’d never before met.

Here we both were, 3,000 miles from where we went to school. Older, greyer, maybe wiser. In our golden years.

And yet, I could picture us both, teenage coeds in the 60s, going to a huge college in the Snowbelt.

“Wasn’t it a momentous time to be in college?” I asked. “Remember the Vietnam War moratorium, and how they closed the school after Kent State? When the ROTC building was set on fire?”

“It was an amazing time,” she said. “The air was electric and we believed anything was possible.”

Yes! I say that all the time. We believed anything was possible.

We both might were probably at this meeting.

We squandered that, our generation did, and I’m sad to say it. We’re all more cynical today, even our young people.

My new friend and I are excited at the prospect of talking more about those days and our lives now. In fact, we’re heading off to Big Sur soon (where else) to hang out and relive our youth, at least in words.

I’m posting the trippy photo I took of my living room Christmas tree as a reminder of those days in Barclay Apartments at Syracuse University, when we definitely inhaled, wore white armbands with black peace symbols and sat cross-legged on the floor stringing love beads.

It was the trippiest of times, a time that will never come again and I feel lucky to have been young then.