Welcome back. It is always a treat to be able to write a column in the first issue of the term before there is a precedent to follow. The temptation to react to someone else's ideas does not get in the way like it usually does. I have done a lot of thinking about what I might be writing during the upcoming year, my final one at Dartmouth College. I hope you all will be able to relate to, if not enjoy, what I have to say. If not I guess I will end up as a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, which itself seems to have a comfortably familiar ring to it.
I just completed the last summer of my life, and I do not mean the summer that can be found on the calendar. I am talking about the kind of summer that happens only three times for most people in a lifetime, and only twice for Dartmouth students. It is the period of three months or so after the school year that is spent at home. It is a time when relationships with hometown friends and family that had been lying dormant are suddenly rekindled. We receive snapshots of summer during Christmas and spring breaks, but only the summer itself is long enough to fool you into believing for a moment that the good old hometown days never ended.
As we plod along through our teens and early 20s, our newly acquired skills and interests often place us in more time consuming summer jobs, ones that perhaps do not allow us to see our friends quite as much as we would like. Yet I cannot help but feel that this unavailability somehow has the ability to strengthen the bond of friendship, even if it means we are cutting short our evening outings to allow for an early commute to work. The stories we repeat to each other again and again never stop being funny, and the biting give and take that often ricochets rapidly among us has not slowed with the passage of time. I wonder sometimes if this kind of rapport might last indefinitely, even between people who rarely see one another. I suppose I cannot fool myself into thinking it can.
Being at the end of my final summer has caused me to think more deeply about the next stage of my life. Like many young people I worked at an internship from June through September. I think about how reassuring it was to know the exact day I would be leaving that job when I started it, and how I will never have that luxury again. Life is not an internship, after all. The comfort of a transient lifestyle has shielded me from having to take anything too seriously up until now, but that comfort has begun to vanish. In its place is a new sense of imminent permanence: a career, a marriage, a place to live and call my own. We are all bound to run into these mountains at some point, though we may run into them at different speeds and at different points in time.
The summer of the Class of 2003 is almost over. For many of us its end will come too soon, and we will yearn for the days when our most pressing concern was how we would be getting home from a local bar at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night. Most of us will still have a little summer left in us when we leave Dartmouth. Our lust for a carefree and merry lifestyle will not be extinguished on graduation day, not by a long shot. But I am starting to feel the air become crisper and cooler, and the leaves on the trees are starting to show a hint of orange. It is probably natural to look with apprehension toward the harshness of winter even as we stand at merely the outset of autumn. We may shudder to think of the frigid Hanover winters, but maybe we have more to fear from winters yet to come. Although we may curse the ice and snow as we are forced to walk through it to class each February morning, we are rightfully optimistic that we will see the grass again by April. What will we do without that assurance?
Then again, who is to say that winter has to come at all? Strangely enough, I do not find myself terribly worried about the future. I can look back and know that I had a great summer. God knows I will miss it. But the fall has always been my favorite season, and I am hoping the coming one lasts for a good long while.
