I am one of those few lucky alumnae who found a way to stay in Ithaca after graduating from Cornell. Building a life in Ithaca was certainly not my original plan. Boston born and bred, I always envisioned settling in some city in the Northeast after college and working in a building with fancy elevators and a maze of office space. But plans changed when at the end of my senior year at Cornell I fell in love with a man who was already living a real adult life in the City of Ithaca. Six years later, we are married and I am still in Ithaca and still happy.
My transition from student to graduate never seemed to happen with any sort of obviousness. Ithaca always felt like the same place it was the day my parents pulled up to North Campus with me in the backseat, ready to start my freshman year. Same gorges, same restaurants, same places to go for a run. As I moved from my Collegetown apartment to a house with my boyfriend, I never felt sad about graduating thinking there was nothing I was really leaving. For years after, when my college friends would recollect that bar, that library, that sandwich at Collegetown Bagels, I brushed it off with no sense of reminiscence. How could I miss that stuff when I never left it? Though after graduating I stopped going to that bar, that library, and rarely ordered that sandwich, I knew I could anytime I wanted. I was immune to whatever sense of longing my fellow Cornell alumni experienced.
Last week, a friend asked me to sit in on a lecture she was giving for a class at the Hotel School. I hadn’t spent any significant time on campus in years, other than the occasional quick drive through to show it off to visitors. I arrived ten minutes early with a fierce need for a pack of gum. I got off the bus at the Johnson School and ran across the street thinking I could snatch a pack at Mac's Cafe in the Statler basement. Immediately entering, fluorescent red lights from under the circulation desk at the Nestle library were beaming into the hallways. It looked more like a disco hall than a library.
After pushing through a mass of students dressed as chefs and girls with Greek lettered bags, I managed to find myself facing a familiar shelf of strawberry Nutri-Grain bars, bags of Skittles, and chocolate-chip cookies the size of a young child's head. No gum.
I shifted gears to the next closest possibility: Terrace. It was in between classes and close to lunchtime, so emerging from the hallway I was up against a challenging line of ladies in what used to be the burrito line but was OBVIOUSLY now the salad line. I knew from experience that I could make a clean break up the middle to hit where the gum might be, though I couldn't get away without hearing a handful of calls for "just a half" with "sesame ginger on the side." Nothing had changed.
And to my disappointment, there was no gum at the registers. I had five minutes to go and knew I'd find what I was looking for across the road at the campus store. There, the market had moved upstairs and the bulk candy section was gone. Bummer. I grabbed a pack of spearmint Orbitz and headed to the register.
"Cornell ID for the raffle?" The cashier asked me. "Uhhh….that raffle is STILL going on…?" I responded. (Wow. Six years later and still a daily giveaway.) She looked at me confused. I hesitated. Why not, I thought. "A-W-G-2-2."
"And the last two digits?" She asked. I almost questioned what she meant and then it hit me. And it hit me hard. Of course, Cornell IDs have FOUR numbers now. What was I doing here? Who did I think I was? Suddenly all I wanted to do was to pay and get out, back into the other Ithaca world I lived in. I handed her a five dollar bill (which caught her off guard as she was expecting Cornell Card), took my change and left.
I crossed the street back to the Statler to head into the lecture. The outdoor Terrace seating was standing room only, packed with aviator glasses, North Face backpacks and smiling faces soaking in the first sunny day that Ithaca had seen in months. I noted the shocking number of salad containers overflowing with iceberg lettuce and I started wondering how many of those had moved through my gut during my days there. A student walking in front of me debated with her friend whether she should take a class Pass-Fail instead of for a grade, while another on the phone was panicking over next year’s housing situation.
I couldn't believe the outfits that passed by me. Bra straps, cleavage and short shorts everywhere. Is this what they wear to class these days? I couldn't get over it. Then I felt old because I couldn't get over it.
Once in the lecture, I couldn’t shake this strange sense of irritation. Everything was so familiar, yet there I was feeling so uncomfortable and out of place. What was it about being dropped back into this setting that put me on edge? What was it about the library, the salads, the Cornell IDs, some of which were exactly as I’d left them only six years ago and others that had changed by only two digits? I lived seven miles down the road but felt light years away from where I was.
And then I realized that this must be what everyone was talking about. This was the reminiscence I thought I was so immune to. These material markers of our college experience—the buildings, the lunch spots, the bars, etc.—all just artifacts of the world we were once so embedded in for four years. It didn’t matter that I’d stayed in Ithaca. There were some pieces of my Cornell experience that I’d never truly get back. It wasn’t really the sandwich that everyone missed (well, maybe for some). It was the people, the atmosphere and all that went with it. It didn’t matter that I had access to these things at any given moment. They were vehicles for memories.
After the lecture, I boarded the bus thinking about the fragility and sacredness of time and place. Perhaps places like Cornell, where we experience such profound intellectual, social and emotional growth, will always be physical places we can return to when we need to remember how wonderfully vulnerable we are to the memories how we once were.
Once downtown, I headed back into my other Ithaca world with a fresh pack of gum and an even fresher perspective on the true meaning of nostalgia.
— Alyssa Goldman '07
Alyssa Goldman '07 works at Concept Systems Inc., a research, planning, and evaluation consulting firm located in downtown Ithaca. She lives in Ithaca with her husband, Jesse.