Moving in

There's nothing like a college town, and though there's a university here, this isn't one. It's only been 50 years, though, and these things take time, especially when the town spends decades making sure the gown knows that the symbolism of its place--way off over among the corn fields, separate and apart, is not just accidental. That's changing, though, for the main reason most things change: cash money.

Which, in a roundabout way, the tall man blocking my way in the Target aisle reminded me of today. For a second I thought I was watching the Dean of Arts & Sciences make faces at the baby across the way, and maybe I was, but I didn't spend too much effort trying to place the face that seemed a little abashed to have been caught cootchie-cooing. Instead, my synapses did what they so often do and fired in another, tangential, direction: "Crap!" I thought. "When do the students come back?"

Because it's gotta be soon, and that means I need to be buying a lot more stuff and then lying low 'til those moms and the dads take their checkbooks and credit cards back to rural Illinois and Chicago. Because even though the college thing here, such as it is, is just about long lines in the stores, and not, say, public drunkenness, there being no football team and a Greek system that's more wishful thinking than reality, this is never how it used to be, and for those of us who commuted through school here, it's still kinda weird to watch them move in, to actually notice when the college kids come back to town.

Not that these students still don't commute, even while living on campus. From those I see on the side of the road, or even at the bus stops, only some international students are apparently intrepid--or stranded--enough to bridge the wide gap that separates the campus from everything else on foot. Everyone else drives. This town, it's not made for walkin', at least over by the school. To live there must not be unlike spending four years as an occupant of an office park, what with the ponds, and the circular drives, and curving, indirect walkways ("to induce a Zen-like calm," we, as tour guides, were taught. Ever been late to class, Mr. Zen Architect?) and, of course, the parking lots. Not that it's not a perfectly fine school, with some bonafide brilliant faculty to whom I owe a lot, but a place to go away to? Not really, not so much. It's just hard to imagine.

Though I suppose that Away is Away, and if one is from a small enough dot on the Land of Lincoln map, all those new strip malls and the quick bridge to the Big City might really be be Something, if not exactly College. Although, really, who am I to say, a self-confessed commuter.

Now while I won't count the school year I apparently spent every other weekend at Mizzou, later on I lived both in Washington University's off-campus neighborhood, a haven for the Very Smart and the Slightly Weird, and then in Iowa City, the most college-y of Big 10 towns. Trying to make up for what I never had? Honestly, no. It's just where we lived, though I loved both places, both because and despite of themselves.

These days, money in the forms of Ethanol research and Division I status get people excited about my local school; I, of course, think they're both lousy ideas. But I appreciate the school, whatever the plans are, even if there's never more college atmosphere in our downtown than the back-to-school family block party that ought to be coming up soon. Given the tenor of the times, I'd rather live in a place with more than its share of PhDs. Sure I know, by demographics and acquaintance, that the politics of many of them are more likely to match mine, but even when they don't, at least they're trained to think.

But these kids who are scattered across the prairie, packing up high school and old girlfriends and who knows what, they don't know any of that, and they don't care. Some of them are coming, as per tradition, because it's cheap, relatively speaking. Some must think they want to be a nurse or an engineer. Some of them, I'm sure, are like I was. But some of them, a few at least, must be coming on purpose. Because, they, like, chose this place, though their choices may have been limited. Amazing.

I only matriculated as I did because, faced with the first big decision of life, I punted. I didn't know what to do, or couldn't follow through with what I knew I wanted or some similarly convoluted thought. Nothing could be less important to me now. I made my memories, my life long friend, and a pile of credits that turned into a good-as-most-anyone's degree once I finally stopped changing my major, all in four years. I learned a lot, some of it even from books or professors. Everything is what you make of it, no matter if it looks like a really odd choice to the lady in the aisle in Target there in town.