Tigers reunion, Dixie-style

Ordinarily the advantages of not keeping an accurate calendar outweigh the disadvantages, but now and again one gets caught out badly. I didn't notice that the Friday I had promised to give a lecture here for "Parents' Weekend" was the first day of my 45th college reunion in Tennessee. I should of course say "my class's 45th and my first." I have been to dozens of Princeton reunions, but never before to one at my own undergraduate institution. At noon I fled McCosh 50 with a haste that completed the puzzlement my lecture has inspired in my audience; but still by the time I got to Dixie, my little reunion tent was empty and dark except for such dim illumination as is offered by streetlights reflected off squashed wax-paper cups.

The next day I learned that only about a dozen members of our class had returned and, of them, only half that number whose names I remembered. I feared a fiasco, but then discovered that the number was precisely right for a class buffet at which I could have substantial conversation with every classmate and even some spouses. When views on Iraq or our gay bishop got sticky, there was always the safe-house of grandchildren. We gabbed and gorged far into the night.

Unwillingly, unfairly, but inevitably I had to compare my reunion with the kind of thing I have come to know at Princeton. That is, of course, to try to match a Saturday sandlot team with the New York Yankees. For instance there was an event called "Cocktails for Those Who Have Given $1000 or More: Quadrangle, 5pm." I mean, they actually printed that in the schedule. I am used to being outed slightly more obliquely in printed programs for the annual dinners of the Friends of You-Name-It, where far below the Archangels, Powers, Principalities, Seraphim, Cherubim and common or garden variety Angels, Joan and I usually find our names among the Acolytes or Doorkeepers. The style seemed decidedly Bush League when compared with the way we do things. After all, a decent Princeton President can rake in a couple hundred million in "commitment," "resources" or at worst "wherewithal", without ever descending to the vulgarity of using the word "money." Nonetheless, I went along to the Quad and though somewhat less sleek and suntanned than my fellow imbibers, I felt no less grand as I sipped my one grand glass of soda water (plastic cup, Vintage Seltzer, no Perrier on the menu). Our college prayer, which I have in my time prayed a thousand times, petitions for "a never-failing succession of benefactors." Rarely can one be the answer of a prayer, even more rarely a prayer of one's own. The satisfaction is nearly infinite.

I have always found aspects of Princeton reunions and especially the P-rade, strangely tender. To participate in the living pageant of generations of former students can move me to tears; but to revisit on a brilliant autumn day the arena of my own most poignant youthful strivings, to walk about, quite literally, among the leaf-strewn graves of my great teachers, are experiences unique in character and intensity, as mellow as the filtered autumn light, yet infinitely sad: sunt lachrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Yes, things mortal tug at the heart. I now understand the slightly dazed, slightly embarrassed, self-conscious air of the more thoughtful alums one bumps into around here on the morning of Baccalaureate Sunday. What I have been ungenerously misdiagnosing as hangover is actually ARPS (Acute Recovered Past Syndrome). At least I myself found in the exuberant revival of long dormant memories — happy and sad, risible and embarrassing, erotic or banal or both — that I was shocked by how thick a slice of my life I had simply forgotten. Despite the fact that I had been a bit of an athlete, for example, I had forgotten that the name of our team is the — yes! — Tigers, and that some guy walks around the margin of the football field in a grubby tigerskin delighting children who rush to the barrier to highfive with him. The Princetonian present had absorbed or colonized the pre-Princetonian past.

I got back home on Sunday night, fairly whacked out, to find the usual screenfull of importunate but unimportant emails, and one piece of vital postal mail — a fat envelope with a "North Texas" postmark and the return address of the "Class of 1954 50th Year Reunion Planning Committee." Now we are talking high-school reunion. The envelope includes a planning questionnaire asking for my email address and the number of my great-grandchildren, among other things. (They tend to breed young down there.) The best question, for which the form allows a full inch and a half of answer, is of the essay variety: "Briefly describe the last 50 years of your life." Wild horses won't keep me away from my first and fiftieth high-school reunion, even though the date is not yet firm. It will be either the second or third weekend in October 2004, "depending on which weekend feature an 'at home' Tiger football game." Of course! The Mount Pleasant Tigers! How could I have forgotten? John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.