Heart and Mind

The Ghost Town that is a Few Years Post College

In the years following college, I'd frequently visit with a friend who still lived in the house he grew up in. To me, the house always had a sad ambiance. It just seemed like a dwelling where the best, significant days were long gone. It had been a place where baby-boomers had raised a family and made a life for themselves, but now all the kids were grown and they were all gone—except for the friend I had, who was the lone one that remained.

The house was well-kept, so it's not like it was falling-apart or even terribly dated-looking. But parts of it were dated, and it seemed quiet, with lots of empty bedrooms. Well, there was stuff in the bedrooms, but usually not people. They simply became guests rooms, spare rooms, rooms to put the extra linens in. Rooms that really weren't necessary anymore. That seemed sad, to me.

In fact, it seemed like the house was just waiting to be sold. And within a few years, it was.

Around the same time—a few years post college—I started noticing a similar trend with my hometown, in general. It was starting to resemble a ghost town. Oh, there were as many people there as ever, but from my perspective, it seemed empty, because the people who I knew were gone. Of course, I was gone, too, and glad to be, but it wasn't just my peers who had fled. Their families were gone, too. I used to be able to go down virtually any street in town and be able to point out a home where I knew someone or had been, so it seemed kind of surreal that I no longer knew the people who lived there. It still does.

A similar thing happened with my college-town, which always was way more than a typical "college-town" to me and a place I still consider to have been a "hometown" of sorts, a place where I established some roots and really did some important living. A few years post-college, the strangest thing happened. I went back and visited like I had in previous years, but this time I had to get a hotel! I no longer had connections to people who lived there and could let me crash on their floor. And, after that visit, I realized I really didn't have any reason to visit anymore, other than to relive a few memories. (Which, of course, if you know me, you'd know is something I love doing.) But that's the only reason to go back.

What spurred this blog entry today and got my mind on this kind of stuff? It's been a slow day at work and I actually was on my college's alumni site and started searching the alumni database for old names, and that is always surreal. You know why? Because unlike high school, where you share this big history with classmates to a certain degree, in college, there are comparatively few people that I was close with, and those are people I'm usually in touch with in some way, directly or indirectly. So the people who pique my curiosity and have me searching are all folks who I didn't really have a tremendous history with, but we shared some small moment in time. These were moments that ranged from insignificant to huge, but, either way, they were all super transient. Here one day, gone the next. Kind of like with the bulk of people who you used to work with at old jobs.

Yet I am endlessly fascinated by seeing the names, the current addresses, and things like the fact that some girls having different last names than the ones I knew them to have. It's wild. I don't know them at all, but I would like to say hello and remind them that I did know them, if only briefly.

I guess this blog entry has morphed into a sister post to the one I did a month or so back about finding people on the web who you used to know. Makes sense to me.

And what does it all mean? Nothing, really. I don't have a desire to go back in time and I like the present. It's just more stuff I sit around musing about during quiet moments. More stuff about time and life passing by.

posted by Steve @ 4:45 PM