College Sticks

In October Trevor had an unofficial reunion of his Columbia College pals. The weekend coincided with the Expo Chicago art fair, and friends came in from New York, North Carolina, and Alaska. And, of course, Chicago.

Our friend Adam, who lives in Fairbanks, came in on Friday and stayed with us for the weekend, and on Saturday we started the day at Navy Pier for the art fair.

We saw some pretty good stuff, though not everything wanted to be touched as much as this thing did

T and Adam walking and talking

On the #66

After we were arted out, we went to Martha and Jeremy's place, where the actual reunion festivities were going down. We had a barbecue, a bonfire, and lots of good art and non-art related conversation.

Some of the gang in the backyard: T taking the picture, Jason, Kyle, Jen, and Adam at the grill

What's up?

Me and Kate

Jeremy and Martha at the bonfire, where we spent the best parts of the night (which included a thirty minute stint of us trying to guess the punchlines to Kate's jokes [some dirty, some not]). I laughed until my stomach hurt.

Kate and Adam doing...yoga?

Now, we had a great weekend and Trevor was able to catch up with people he doesn't get to see that often. They talked and laughed about their time at Columbia, and told hilarious stories about each other and some of their friends who couldn't make it for the weekend. But what really hit home for me was how much of an impact their college years had on them.

Most everyone in their crowd is doing something related to photography or design. They've all continued to be creative people in many aspects of their lives (although Kyle doesn't formally shoot, he's a husband, the father of two girls, and he's doing social outreach, so he's a whole different kind of creative). Watching and listening to them was inspiring and hopeful. They'd bonded as friends and as artistic peers, and the work they made and learned about during school has stuck with them.

The college where I teach has a dramatically different environment than Columbia's, and the students I teach in my gen. ed. composition classes will never quite have the bond that other classes--those within a student's major--would have. But sometimes I get an inkling that my class has stuck with my students. That comes more frequently in my creative writing students--in July I wrote a post about a painting one of my spring creative writing students gave to me, and this past Friday I received an e-mail from a student in that same class who wanted to update me with pictures of her new baby (she was pregnant during our class) and thank me for helping her and pushing her writing.

But today I got an e-mail from a student I'd had last spring in a composition 2 class. That class focuses around source-based writing and I have my students read Columbine by Dave Cullen, which is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, but horrifying book about the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. And my student, who is a soldier now stationed in Afghanistan, was, on his off time (I can't imagine what "off time" consists of in Afghanistan, but it's certainly different from my off time, sitting on the couch watching The Ring and drinking hot chocolate), browsing through the news and came across an article about the new book Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. The article focuses on an interview Solomon had with Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine H.S. shooters, and my student saw it, remembered our class, and "just thought [he] would share."

Now, is this the same as inspiring a conversation of ten former students as they sit around a bonfire, ten years after graduation, waxing nostalgic and artistic? No. But it's what I've got and it made me pretty happy.