Reflecting on a 15-Year College Reunion

From Thursday through Sunday, I was at my 15-year college reunion up in Western Massachusetts, and I stayed in dorm housing. It was much easier to set up a portable shrine there than in my previous travels visiting family, and setting up the shrine brought back memories of the shrine I’d put on the bookshelf back when I was studying, even though I had had trouble sticking to a set schedule due to college life.

Most of the alums coming to reunion had had kids during the pandemic, and many of them had brought them. I was grateful when I realized that my cats had trained me to wake up between 5:20-5:50. It meant that when I awoke, I could easily find a shower stall and not have to compete with anyone wrangling toddlers.

Out of everyone who came, I only knew maybe six people and had only really hung out with about three of them back in college, so I met a lot of people I hadn’t encountered before. Nobody I was very close to came to reunion, and it sounds like a few had chosen to go to the wedding of someone I’ve fallen out of touch with instead. That person came to the reunion, though, and I was happy that she had come out and a bit jealous that her fiancée and she obviously have a shared, deeply religious life — her future wife plays organ at an Episcopal(?) church — and I expect that it’s how they met because I remember her being deeply Catholic and very, very closeted. I hadn’t wanted to be gay, either, because I’d already experienced so much religious bullying growing up that having yet another thing just felt like the universe being cruel to me. I remember that we both did very embarrassing and weird things in college that in retrospect were self-closeting red flags. But she’d had to work through a lot more due to her religion’s teachings on homosexuality. The jealousy I felt really surprised me because it made no logistical sense. My viable relationship dating pool is essentially zero people, but there are a lot of support groups for various denominations of Christians grappling with their sexual orientation, so it’s easy for them to meet one another despite their religious marginalization.

So I spent a lot of time alone at reunion. It was the off-weekend, so graduating students and their parents weren’t crowding the campus. We had a modest alum parade where we all wore the traditional white with the colors of our classes and processed through one another, and we did a modest form of Illumination Night. A 2024 graduate gave an amazing speech, grounded in her Muslim faith and optimistic about her future career in neuroscience.

I caught up with one of the few people I knew in advance of going to a reading from an alumna and professor emerita we both knew — she because she’d taken classes with her in the theater department, and I because my specfic English professor had assigned her work to us, and it was the first specfic work I had read that made me feel at home because it didn’t center a Christian view of the world. Encountering the alum’s book Mindscape in college was a very transformative moment for me. We talked for a few minutes about the pagan group in college and how it had died after us — a shame because doing rituals in the group meant being allowed to book campus spaces, having a budget for ritual items from the student activities fees, and having some group accommodations for incense and candles in booked campus spaces. Our conversation was cut short by another alumna joining us. The brief chat was a very bitter contrast to the assembly speech we had heard from the new alumna and my encounter with the woman from my class that I mentioned two paragraphs up. I went to my dorm room for a few hours on the Saturday afternoon to process my emotions because there were a lot of them, and emotion regulation is important.

I do wish that the modern pagan and polytheist spaces were less online and more in-person and vid chat. I think that connecting with people synchronously is hard, though — college spaces are the easiest because everyone is co-located even if schedules can be busy, but it still has the wicked problem of how to bring together different personalities and different values systems. I’m one of the few polytheists I know who is willing to talk to other polytheists with different values systems than me, which was once much more common than it is now, but everything I have read about social media underscores just how important this is for preventing extreme views from taking root, especially in the Internet age when algorithms silo us all apart. I became more firmly committed to that while reading You Are Us (my review here). And I think that’s even harder for young people because I remember being a new adult and being occasionally (often?) confrontational. For instance, a lot of people left the pagan group when I was co-chair because I was very firm about distinguishing it from New Age practices and was not keen on us having a group discussion on crystal healing. That was a good decision because the two are totally different. It was a terrible decision for me to try to have a panel with area pagans and to also try being on the panel because we really should have focused on bringing in mentors instead. It also would have been good to coordinate more than just group rituals, as we could have given space for people to meet others with praxis affinities. The things you realize when you’re older.

Anyway. The art gallery had a lot of really cool things going on in it. The entire third floor has been redone to show a compare/contrast between art from different periods and geographic locations. One of the staff members at the art gallery said that complaints had been made, but I can’t imagine why. It was very cool to see comparisons between Renaissance and modern portraiture, or the comparison between still life fruit bowls created in different regions before you could fly fresh fruit before it spoiled, or traditional Chinese landscape paintings against contemporary Chinese semi-impressionistic landscape paintings.

My favorite piece from that section was Torkwase Dyson’s Scalar Scalar (#3 Gulf of Mexico-Extraction-Black). It was paired with another circular piece, both visible at the link if you scroll down to the selections of comparative compositions. Old Mother West Wind was another composition I really enjoyed, a piece that’s in a few collections. The one I had the most mixed feelings about, but appreciated seeing all the same for being confronted with those feelings, was a painting of alumna Juliana Armour Ferguson, who was a very active Egyptology enthusiast and collector and who posed for her portrait with Egyptian artifacts. Of course, this would not be considered ethical now, and I wished that there had been more context around the portrait because it could have been paired with art by a contemporary Egyptian woman. (Edit: I forgot to mention these beautiful stickers of creation stories from around the world in the gift shop.)

The other delight was finally seeing in person the new library. The previous library had been completely gutted, and only the facade was retained. The new library is filled with warm woods and a midcentury/contemporary aesthetic that I really, truly love. It has a prayer and meditation room inside, and I went there to sit and reflect for a few minutes.

Of course, all things must come to an end. I traveled back home on Sunday and returned to my cats, who inspected the college swag — we were all given unicorn plushies with a college shirt on it due to the sheer number of toddlers present — and blessed the only 100% cotton collegiate shirt I could find in the bookstore (that wasn’t bright yellow) with a coating of cat fur.

And it was good to be in my own space again.