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player ready...I’m in central Illinois, driving east on Interstate Highway 74 to cover a story. It’s a couple of days before Mother’s Day.
Before graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana 20 years ago, I traveled this route between my home and the university it seemed a thousand times. Interstate Highway 57 to I-74, exit Lincoln Avenue.
Because I’m ahead of schedule and because I’m alone with the music blasting and I’m thinking it’s been 20 years (really 20 years?), I decide to veer off and take a spin through campus. I haven’t been back in more than a decade.
I exit I-74 at Lincoln Avenue. I expect change, and the landscape obliges with its new apartment buildings and businesses that appear cookie-cutter.
Further down is the Illinois Street Residence Halls, where I was a resident adviser my junior and senior years. I lived in the Wardall Hall tower, which housed the women. Townsend Hall housed the men. A central common area separated the two.
I walk through this morning, and the changes here are much more subtle. The bulletin boards still hold information about apartments for rent for the summer. The Daily Illini is stacked near the main office. Students wheel dollies with their belongings out to mini-vans and SUVs lining the semicircular driveway. Parents help them load clothes, stuffed animals, boxes, television sets.
Theirs is the generation of “American Idol” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” Ours was “L.A. Law” and “The Cosby Show.”
About 20 of us were Wardall’s and Townsend’s resident advisers. We were a Cosby-esque amalgam of students.
The only other African-American R.A. was also from Chicago’s South Side. Upon graduation, she was heading to medical school. Last fall, our paths crossed for the first time in more than two decades. She’s now a gynecologist.
There was the Asian-American guy who hugged everybody, danced a lot and gave impromptu back rubs. He truncated his given name, demanding we call him simply “Yo.”
There was Thom, an engineering student and self-professed redneck, who had grown up on a farm outside of Springfield. One Wednesday night, when the weekly R.A. meeting was canceled, he and I drove to his house for dinner. I recall it was a pleasant — if at times a bit uncomfortable — evening.
There was Ginnie, a psychology major, who had waist-length blond hair and was a few years older than the rest of us. Her education had been sidelined for personal reasons. Years later, I attended her wedding.
Then there was the Young Republican resident adviser who could have been the inspiration for Niles Crane of the TV comedy “Frasier.” Only he probably was a bit more conservative and definitely more religious.
One afternoon, a few of us gathered in one of the dorm’s lounge areas and a question was posed to several of the white male R.A.s: Could you marry a black woman? My conservative friend said he couldn’t because of the social pressure. Besides, he had a beautiful girlfriend he was going to wed after graduation.
When he e-mailed me recently, having discovered the column, he told me he indeed had gotten married, had two sons, but now was divorced. Just as certainly as he’d known back then that he’d get married, he also had known that he was gay.
I leave Illinois Street Residence Halls and drive down to where I lived when I first arrived on campus in August 1983. The streets don’t even pretend to be recognizable.
My first night in Blaisdell Hall, I introduced myself to my floormates as a pre-med student and proud Chicago resident, a South Sider.
That April, Harold Washington had become the city’s first black mayor, and the election had shone a klieg light on the black-white divide. Challenger Bernie Epton had urged Chicagoans to vote for him, a Republican, “Before it’s too late.” Later, the council wars would become legendary.
In May 1987, when I left the university, Washington had just been re-elected to a second term. Our family car bore a blue and white Washington bumper sticker as it pulled into that semicircular drive to take my things away.
Friday morning, as I’m heading back to the interstate, I’m reminded that for years after leaving Urbana, I had that recurring graduation dream. Many people have it. It’s the one in which you’re running across the quad, late for a final; or you find out you’re lacking one credit-hour toward graduation.
I don’t recall when I stopped having that dream or when I figured out that what I left with was mine and couldn’t be taken away. That college life and the real world intersect in a few places before they diverge forever.
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I have few regrets in this drive forward.
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