Today I’m driving upstate to spend a week in Ithaca, where I’ll be cat-sitting for a friend who’s going to Cape Cod — or, as my friend Meg and I used to call it, ‘The Cake’ — for a week of vacation.
Interestingly enough, this summer marks twenty years since I graduated from Cornell. I skipped the reunion, however, which I believe took place in June; there was only one person I knew who was going, and I didn’t want to be immersed in a kind of artificial nostalgia for a college ‘experience’ about which I have much ambivalence. When I think of Cornell, the first question that comes to mind is usually: why did I go there? Not that I think this question is unique; I know a lot of people who in retrospect wonder why they went to a particular college (or even why they went to college), not to mention any number of other things from the past that may or many not haunt us as we grow older.
With a week to myself (and a cat) in Ithaca, I’ll have lots of time to figure it out.
