Why do people want to revisit the places they used to live or go to school?
Is it nostalgia for the person they used to be when they lived there? Is it to find the happier past and that happier person they were then? I dunno. Maybe.
All I know is that I wanted to see Storrs, Connecticut again. It had been 50 years.
I was 23 when I started the MA program in English there.
I’m 73 now.
(jesus.)
That MA program ate me alive. I was totally unprepared for everything—but especially the intellectual rigor and the serious, highly motivated students. I thought I was pretty smart until I met this group. They were all terrifyingly well-read, could crank out 20-page papers with no sweat, and were pissed they didn’t get into Yale.
I spent most of those 2 years in the library trying to catch up. I read day and night. I read till my eyes bled.
It was the most intensely intellectual experience of my life. I barely made it.
When those 2 years ended, and I came back here to Mansfield, I cried for months. The woman who began that MA in Lit at UCONN was gone. She had phoenixed herself up from the ashes of a pretty self-satisfied little doofus into something bright and intellectually sparkly. She was in the best intellectual shape of her life with no one to talk to but a Jevovah’s Witness who knocked on the door on a very bad day, wanting to talk about Jesus.
Going back, I knew the campus would be unrecognizable, and it was. (Everything is unrecognizable after 50 years.) But I did find the library.
It’s not the library anymore; it’s an administration building, but they spared the Reading Room in the renovation.
By some miracle, the door to the Wilbur Cross Building was open when every other building was closed for the 4th of July holiday.
I went in. It’s a wonderful room. I always loved it.
There used to be periodicals lining the walls, but they’re gone now. It feels more like a room in a museum.
I sat down.
I waited for my past self to plop down with her heavy backpack.
I waited for her to look up and smile at me. To ask me what I was doing there with no notebook, no backpack, no pen, no homework.
But she never showed up.
She is completely gone. Renovated beyond recognition. Razed.
I couldn’t find her in the library, or at the house on Codfish Falls Rd, or at the house on Lake Chaffee. And I looked.
Codfish Falls Rd House
Lake Chaffee house
I really thought I would feel her presence. I thought the place would trigger a download of memories, but it didn’t. I have completely lost her.
Do I miss the woman who read in that library, lived in those houses, drove those New England roads back and forth from campus?
No, I don’t miss her, but I do understand her better now. She was running on intuition, ambition, and hope. She had very little self-awareness, no courage, and no confidence.
She was trying to play an academic game that was already fixed against her. But in the process of playing and losing, she found other identities to try on, other selves to be.
They say you can never go home again.
You can never go back.
Maybe that’s for the best.
Inspiration Location 