This spring marks the 50th anniversary of my graduating from college. Which means it has been 54 years since I first set foot on the Princeton campus.
My dad went to the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. He was the first and only member of his family to attend college. My mother started but never finished her college degree at St. Louis University.
I didn’t grow up with any images or role models of what college might mean. I liked school and did well. Books were so much easier to understand than people. Courtesy of a wise nun in my parochial school, I ended up in a Catholic, all-boys college prep school for middle school and high school. College was now the next step on the ladder. Ladder to what wasn’t clear but I knew how to do the school thing. Come my senior year, the headmaster gives me a list of four schools to apply to including Harvard and Princeton. These were still just names to me.
Part of the application process included interviews with recent alumni of each school. The one thing I remember from those interviews is the contrast in attitudes of those two alums whose names and faces I cannot recall. The Harvard grad was all about how Harvard would set me on the path to future success. The Princeton grad touched on similar points but was mostly keen on wishing he could be in my shoes to go back to Princeton and experience it all again.
When I got into both schools with similar financial aid packages, my choice was easy. In September of 1971, I set foot on the Princeton campus for the first time. I don’t recall that college visits were a common thing in my day, although it might have been as much about the logistics of getting nine people to the East Coast and back. The same constraints meant that I arrived on campus on my own.
How I navigated those first weeks is a mystery. I imagine most everyone else was as lost and confused as I was. And as desperately trying to mask their confusion. Not that I remember it that way.
What I was building was a capacity to cope effectively with the new. As a book smart guy from near, if not on, the wrong side of the tracks there was so much I did not understand. Often, I did not understand that I didn’t understand. I muddled through nonetheless.
A wise nun, a particular Princeton grad…. These people (or angels) that appear in our lives, sometimes just briefly, propel us to our best destiny.
How do we find a way to keep inviting these people into our path? And how do we become one of these people in another’s life? Questions we should ask every morning.
I’ve lived in Princeton for 20 plus years and having the University there is a tremendous gift. Make sure you stop by labyrinth books, which replaced McCawber but is very good in its own right. sit at the bar at mediterra and have a nice glass of wine if you like and some lovely tapas. And then the best ice cream in New Jersey is at the Bent spoon on Palmer square. Happy 50th