Salad Days

"when I was green in judgement . . ."

I work on a college campus and as a result, there are a good number of times when something I see or that I’m involved in will remind me of my own college days. In fact, I work on the campus that I attended for undergrad and so sometimes it’s a bit like living in a town full of ghosts, some friendly, some not so.

That restaurant there used to be Mexicali Grille that had the best margaritas and where I went on my first date with the guy who broke my heart.¹ That bar there used to be O’Malley’s and on Thursdays they had nickel night and you could get blasted — even underage! — on less than a dollar if you weren’t picky about the quality of your alcohol. That building there was where we used to have to go stand in line to use a computer and to print your papers that were due.

Unlike Wooderson’s observation, the kids look younger and younger to me each year, and this summer I realized that, given the age of my kids, statiscally that means that most of the parents I see on campus for summer orientation are likely younger than I am, which was startling let me tell you.

On Wednesday afternoon I was walking down to another of our campus buildings for our annual ice cream social and as I walked I noticed that there was not a soul in sight. Summer semester is well underway and I did not encounter a single student, which was, frankly, weird. Campus had begun to seem emptier over the years and especially after Covid, but you could almost always see some students around, but this year it seems like there aren’t any.

Now don’t get me wrong, we “townies” and especially those of us who work for the university, we look forward to breaks and summer when the nearly forty thousand students leave town. We can find places to park, restaurants and bars aren’t packed, traffic is much lighter. But there were almost always some students around.

I was talking to my boss about it and it seems as though many students are now taking summer classes completely online from home or wherever. And I get that that’s convenient, especially if you’re doing an internship which are now practically required and weren’t really a thing when I was in school. I worked all through college, but it was in no way related to my degree!

But I do think there’s something the students are missing by not staying in town for the summer. I did summer school every year and I loved the relaxed feeling on campus. Classes were much smaller for one thing. I remember my Chemistry 108 class had maybe thirty students whereas the Chemistry 107 prerequisite had nearly three hundred. You might only be taking one class, or maybe two, which meant a lot less pressure than the rest of the academic year. You might become friends with an entirely different set of people during the summer, people you might not have encountered or thought you could have a friendship with during the regular school year simply because there were fewer of you. You could be at the pool then throw on some clothes and head to class and then come right back to the pool.

Going to summer school felt like being part of a secret club of sorts. As I walked the other day, I passed by the building where I had all my major classes. Inside it looks almost identical to the way it did thirty years ago, a fact I kind of love but also kind of hate since it is a signifier of the lack of love and attention the English department gets from administrators. The building still smells exactly the same inside, like old linoleum and old books, but it always smelled a little different in the summer, a little mustier maybe, but the air conditioning was always delightfully arctic and I’d walk into class to see the few other hardy souls that were also getting American Lit out of the way or diving into an advanced Shakespeare class. You’d develop a camaraderie with them that was different from the way you’d interact with classmates during fall, winter, and spring quarter.

There’s a lot I don’t miss about my college years, but there’s something about summer that wallops me with a nostalgia hammer. I don’t ever want to be twenty-one again, but I wouldn’t mind going back to those carefree days when all I had to do was read books, go to class, and go to my little job after school. Just for a little while.

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nb: I just learned that “salad days” comes from Shakespeare! In my defense, I never read Antony and Cleopatra. I concentrated mostly on Old English and Medieval Lit.

1. It was where he took all the girls he cheated on me with on their first dates! Fun!