Going back to Nassau Hall

This weekend the Band took a two-hour road-trip to Cape May to crash a wedding. The newlyweds were both alumni, but he was class of 2005 and she of 2001, so it could hardly have been the concurrent experience of Princeton’s undergraduate-focused environment which brought them together. While we were playing Going Back to Nassau Hall, I idly made the connection that the bride and groom could have met at reunions, and thought little of it. It was another episode which illuminated this connection further, one precipitated by a guest yelling “Alumni Sanchez!” Immediately dozens of guests, all of them grown adults, rushed forward with childlike expressions of unmitigated joy, eager to relive their undergrad years and play our perennial favorite song Children of Sanchez. I handed off my clarinet to a graduated officer and retreated to watch these distinguished alumni yell themselves hoarse and dance like they weren't wearing dignified formalwear. Though Career Services may focus on alumni networking, the Treasurer on annual giving and Susan Patton on marriage, Princetonia is worth it for its own sake. When we share traditions, dances, songs, and a potentially meningitis-inoculated clarinet reed with Princetonians past and future, we are imbibing our actions with the meaning of that most basic human need, belonging.