My homecoming was two weeks ago. I don't mean that I lit a bonfire in my dorm room and ran around it in a drunken frenzy. Rather, I went home for the first time in a month. After what seemed like eternity, I would finally make the pilgrimage back home to that Eden of American suburbia known as West Hartford, Conn. It was precisely these thoughts that occupied my mind as I waited for my parents to come whisk me away from the cozy confines of Hanover.
Needless to say, the initial encounter was a joy for both parties. Yet it almost seemed that their joy lay in the fact that after a whole (gasp!) month, I was still disease-free, the frosh 15 was still around the corner, and I had a general aura of sobriety and intelligence around me. Imagine the rapture on their faces when they saw that my dorm room did not resemble a fetid pit and that whatever food was in our dorm was still edible. This made me a bit confused. Did they expect that a month in college would transform me into some sort of horribly distorted caricature of my old self? A feeling of alienation crept over me like the oncoming night over the surrounding hills.
The ride back home was also unusual, albeit in a different way. During the whole two and a half excruciating hours I was forced to field a multitude of questions. Except that, of course, I had to be careful, if you get my drift. Drinking? Of course not, not at Dartmouth -- I mean, it is illegal, mom. Studying? Oh, all the time, dad. And I'm really taking that advanced chemistry class too. Did I say I played rugby? I'm sorry, I meant I was in the chess club ... Anyway, you get the idea. It only frustrated me that I could not tell them what Dartmouth was really like and how much I really enjoyed and loved it. Above all, I had to justify the hefty $30,000-plus price tag this College carries, and if this meant that I had to circumscribe the truth, well, so be it. However, by the time we reached Massachusetts, my previous feeling of alienation was making its way up my throat, and I almost felt like booting.
In a column on Tuesday in The Dartmouth, Liam Kuhn '02 described the emotion of seeing his best friend and how he had not found anyone at Dartmouth yet with whom he could continue a friendship of that caliber. Although I have no intention of regurgitating his point, I felt a similar emotion when I visited my best friend the next day at his high school. He had not changed much, and this was not a surprise, since we talked on the phone regularly. Although we had only been best friends for a year we were as close as any two friends could be. He still remembered all of our inside jokes, all of the good times and generally had stayed true to our friendship.
In short, he had not changed at all. Rather, whatever spiritual upheaval took place during that month was within me. Sure, I told him much more about Dartmouth than I did my parents. Within an hour of conversing with me, he knew the name of every fraternity on campus, every variation of pong and just about everything else that I found dear at Dartmouth -- from smoothies at Collis to the panoramic view from the Top of the Hop.
Still, the numbing sense of alienation was not even washed away by the warmth of friendship. All he could do was listen to me sing the praises of Dartmouth and say "Great. I'm really happy for you." No, none of this, of course, would bring him closer to Hanover and allow him to enjoy Dartmouth with me. Although he was still my closest friend, he was now merely an onlooker in my life. Thus, it is not surprising that the sense of estrangement and discomfort lingered during my homecoming.
Such sentiments only left me upon my return to Dartmouth. These fellow Dartmouth-ites are the people with whom I share my life and to whom it is easiest to relate and be around. It is with them I will spent there definitive years of my life. I was at home.
