This is the fifth time I have sat down and tried to write this essay, which is fitting since my subject is the five year anniversary of our graduation from Wake Forest. The truth is that I find it hard to write about college. My gut is to be regretful – “I should have majored in something practical” – or to let my experience drip with nostalgia – “drinking with my buddies was like an endless summer.” But nobody wants to read that, including myself, and those who know me well know I’m not masculine enough to talk about my “buddies.” So instead I’ve decided to write about a picture.
The photo above captures my group of friends, a few days before our graduation in May 2015, outside of Putters. Putters is the place you go to get food in a basket, with fried potatoes on the side and cups of dipping sauce. When I tell people I like Southern cuisine I’m not thinking of gumbo, or tomato pie. I’m thinking of Putters. Fried mashed potatoes, formed into a ridged chip, with buffalo seasoning and a big cup of ranch.
That group of friends was my world at Wake Forest. A couple are not pictured, and one is no longer with us, but those guys made up the bulk of my experience at the school. We were always searching for each other, as I was reminded the other day, scrolling through our ancient group texts: looking for someone to eat with, someone to study with, someone to go drink with. My fraternity all studied, for the most part, in the E Room, an auditorium style classroom in the library, where it was guaranteed you could find five, ten, sometimes twenty of us all studying. We went to the room out of convenience, since we always found an open seat, but we stayed to be distracted. There was a gigantic projector screen and a circular trashcan by the door, where we could launch balled up chip bags and empty plastic bottles. It wasn’t hard to be distracted.
Our group text lives on, five years later, and on May 18th, when the Class of 2020 graduated from Wake, Sam wrote: Wow I had no idea today was the five year anniversary of graduation… I’m gonna sit and stare at a wall and be depressed. Five years since Stephen Colbert, our commencement speaker, described our future as “a dark chasm of yawning uncertainty,” told us that “Duke sucks,” and gave a shout out to Dean Shore, the campus barber. Among the jokes was the standard fare, a push to “say goodbye to the person we’ve become,” to have “your own set of standards,” and to “score yourself on a curve.” We were all laughing too hard to imagine the possibility of being five years removed from that moment.
I probably would have followed Sam to the void of a blank wall, had it not been for a few days before, when Anne found a stack of pictures from a college weekend in Myrtle Beach. That was my time for melancholy. I hadn’t thought about those trips in awhile, and here it all was, candidly staring back at me.
The common inclination among all of us is to rush towards nostalgia, whose Greek roots, nostos – return home – and algos – pain – connote a sort of wounded remembering. And at times it certainly feels that way. I feel nostalgic thinking about high school lacrosse practices with Mr. Mal, or my first apartment in New York City and the five friends that came with it. The wound comes from knowing none of those things will be repeated in the future.
Flipping through the pictures now, we all look so happy. Mike, Cam and Shovers pound the table during a game of Thumper. A choreographed dance to a song I don’t remember happens on a porch. Five of us snap a selfie walking down the four block stretch of Ocean Avenue between the Avista and the sketchy place we were staying. If I had to put words in Sam’s mouth, I think it would be this: We’re five years away from that? What happened?
We’ve grown up. We’ve dispersed. Some of us have grown apart, others have grown closer. We no longer live on the same hall, or on the same street, so it’s fitting that our closeness as a group has faltered. Pairs of us have lived together. Most went back to Wake for homecoming in 2016, and some have made trips to Miami, or Vegas, or New York since then. A few years ago, almost all of us took what is hopefully our last ever trip to North Myrtle Beach.
But this pandemic has changed our trajectory – we’re a Zoom squad now. We no longer feel like a group of men separated from our college selves, connected as we are by a series of webcams every Saturday night. We talk about the state of things where we live, and briefly about our work, but mostly we fall back into a familiar rhythm: hours spent doing pretty much nothing, and enjoying the hell out of it.
It can be hard, particularly for a group of men like ours, who were actively refusing to grow up and take on adult responsibility, to look back on our college experience and simply appreciate it for what it was. We don’t need to be told that a span of such carefree living won’t come again. But now, listening to Colbert’s speech for the first time in five years, I wish that is what he had cautioned us to do. Screw the future – I wanted to be told to be thankful for the culmination of such a wonderful time in my life. Or, it being Colbert, to be told to be thankful that “Mom and Dad paid for you to spend time on a couch, drinking Busch Lights.”
So that is what I am determined to be. What I see when I look at us in the Putters parking lot is a reminder of the fun we had across four short years at Wake Forest. It can’t be taken away, or recreated. And that’s a good thing.
Edited by: Jake Cucarola