Reunions

Super short entry today, folks, as I am rocking beautiful (read: gray and drizzly) New Haven at my 5th year reunion. Read all about reunions of all sorts (as well as the dig I get in at SB for not coming along) at Romancing the Blog.

I’ve been in shock since I got here. Though I have not returned to the campus since 2002, I feel like I spent most of last spring and summer wandering these slate paths. For a moment, yesterday, I was concerned that my memory had failed me. Would the campus look the way I remembered it? Would it look the way I’d drawn it in my book?

And then we turned the corner off Chapel St. onto High, and passed ‘neath the arch of the Art & Architecture building, and whizzed by the darkened yard of Skull & Bones, and I got a thrill.

This place looks exactly the same! Every stone, every arch, every carving. I’m overcome with nostalgia with every step. There isn’t a corner of this campus that doesn’t hold some memory for me, whether my own or the overlay of “Eli University” where Amy Haskel has her adventures. Look, there’s the nook where George and Amy hide. There’s the building where Amy does her interview. Right now, I’m sitting in the coffee shop where Malcolm gets his bagels.

I know I didn’t invent this place, so I shouldn’t feel the wonder of it coming to life, but there’s some small part of me, some little “Anthony Hopkin’s stepson in front of the wardrobe in Shadowlands” part that thinks any second that I will look up, and my characters will walk through the door.