Cara Holman

Reunion

The band is just warming up, and my heart is thumping along to the drum beat. Every five years I come here, every five years I ask myself why. I'm not sure which I'm more afraid of: that I'll see someone I used to know, or that I won't.

fluttering palm fronds
only as old
as I feel

We used to laugh at the middle-aged (or so they seemed to us) alumni who came trekking to campus every fall like they were on some kind of pilgrimage. You could spot them from a mile away by the nametags fastened around their necks with bright red cord, their names printed in half-inch high letters. They often stopped to ask me where this or that building was, and always looked slightly befuddled when I pointed them in the right direction, murmuring things like, "Well, this sure wasn't here in my day." Or you'd find them in the Quad, stepping carefully along the class plaques, until they found their class year. I stood on my own class plaque just this afternoon, and 29 tiles on, located my son's.

red-tiled roofs
Die Luft
der Freiheit weht