No Nostalgia for Old Graduates
My Binghamton graduation, circa 2009.
This week I decided to get nostalgic and revisit my roots, so I drove up to Binghamton, where I went to college approximately 50 years ago. I’m also visiting Ithaca, where I ended up spending many weekends during my college years.
Both cities contain one of my former college roommates. The three of us, each transfer students from elsewhere in New York, were crammed into a two-person dorm room at the beginning of our sophomore year in 2006 (12 years ago??!?!?!!) which understandably led to a lot of bonding. After I graduated in 2009, I continued coming back upstate once in a while for the periodical visit, often accompanied by another college friend, sometimes on my own.
From left, Andrea, Abra, Amy, in our shared dorm room. Three fresh-faced sophomores!
It wasn't not-cramped.
My last visit was aaaallllll the way back in 2013. (I just had to comb through five years of Facebook photos to verify that.) Since that time, I got a job (making further visits relatively impossible), moved apartments, and then moved countries. It’s been a while, in both the linear and the lifetime sense.
My first stop when I got to Binghamton was Wegmans. For anyone who doesn’t know about Wegmans, I weep for you. It’s only the best supermarket chain in America. I can’t speak for other countries, but I suspect it might be the best in the world. Whenever I was depressed by Binghamton’s cold, dismal weather and less-than-vibrant cultural life, or when I was just depressed in general, I would go to Wegmans for a cure, and it worked every time. The store is not just bright and clean and well-organized and friendly, and the bakery doesn’t just smell incredible, and their Marketplace Cafe doesn’t just make delicious fresh hot food. You can get all that elsewhere. But Wegmans goes way, way, way beyond that. In every possible way, Wegmans is totally focused on making your customer experience the best it can be. They provide amenities and conveniences you never knew you were missing, or that you never thought could be supplied by your local supermarket. The employees are the nicest and most helpful. It’s just the best, cheeriest, best grocery store that there is. Period. Last word on this subject forever.
Best. Supermarket. Ever.
So obviously, it was the first place I went. The truth is, I didn’t even know until a year or two into my Binghamton career that we even HAD a Wegmans. I first experienced it in Ithaca, so I had associated it with the idea of the crunchy, cute, hippy-dippy little town that I considered Ithaca to be. It seemed almost incongruous in Binghamton, which was why it offered such a wonderful contrast to everything else in the city. For most of my college days, I was all about Walmart, which, just so you know, is much more consistent with the Binghamton vibe (i.e., much more full of obese people wearing camouflage).
For fun, or whenever one of us needed something, anything, my friends and I would drive to Walmart and spend hours there. I didn’t really start going regularly to Wegmans until senior year, when I had my own car and my own off-campus house, which I needed to stock with food.
During that year, my sister was a freshman at Binghamton, so I would take her to Wegmans pretty often, probably at least twice a month, to get some groceries and enjoy a meal at the Marketplace. We loved the cafe there. In my pre-kosher days, it didn’t get better than sweet and sour chicken and sticky rice at the Wegmans Asian station.
And yet going back, as I did yesterday, wasn’t particularly nostalgic. I definitely didn’t remember where anything was. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it; I was having the time of my life. I went up literally every single aisle with my cute little basket on wheels, delighting in every fresh piece of evidence that Wegmans was just as amazing as I remembered. I picked up a few snacks and a few non-food items, but mostly I just revelled in the atmosphere. They have tons of bulk items, not just candy, but health foods, rice, tea, coffee, even a make-your-own trail mix bar!
OMG Wegmans is the coolest.
Do you know how fun it is to dispense and weigh out your own bulk items and print the sticker yourself? Wegmans knows, that’s why they let you do it. And it’s all strictly honor system, because Wegmans trusts you. How can you not love it?
They also have a massive organic food section, and an entire freezer section devoted to “plant-based” meals which shouldn’t be plant-based (like vegan meat and pizza and cheese. It is all against nature). In short, they have a selection that makes an Israel transplant like me drool. (Israel does not provide a lot of options in supermarkets. That’s a massive understatement, but I’m not in the mood to Israel bash.)
So I spent a happy hour frolicking through Wegmans, and then I went to my friend Andrea’s house in downtown Binghamton. The route took me partly through the way I used to drive from our house, when I lived downtown, to campus. That cloverleaf turn was a bit nostalgic, as was driving past the campus entrance and some familiar-looking buildings. After all, I used to drive there every day, and before that, I lived on campus for two years. Three years of my life were spent in the Binghamton area! I recognized a few old landmarks - driving down good ol’ Vestal Parkway, past UP (University Plaza, duh) and all the restaurants we used to go to - Tully’s, Mario’s, Five Guys, Coldstone, all still there . . . Planet Fitness, of course . . . along the Susquehanna River towards downtown, the State Street bridge . . . yes, it all looked vaguely familiar.
As did the turns and streets I navigated and passed to get to Andrea’s. Pennsylvania Avenue, Conklin Avenue, State Street, Vestal Avenue. There was the arena where we saw hockey games, the street with all the bars where we staggered around drunkenly most Saturday nights.
But none of these memories came out very strongly. The nostalgia only reached down to a certain point, and no further; it was very surface. I had, apparently, phased out most of my memories of Binghamton pretty well over the past decade. In fact, today while I was driving, I repeatedly got lost in the downtown area, even though I’ve lived there, and even though I had GPS. I kept making wrong turns. In a place where I’ve lived!
In itself, that’s not so strange. I have a horrendous sense of direction. If you blindfolded me and drove me five minutes from my house, I would be lost. So it’s not weird that I’ve completely forgotten where anything is in this place I haven’t been for years and years.
And yet that wasn’t the whole story. Memories didn’t come rushing back. Vague ideas of certain experiences, feelings, moments, kind of lurked in the back of my brain, but they barely materialized. Everything was hazy. My memories weren’t sharp, they didn’t crowd in on me as I revisited this place from my past. They weren’t . . . memorable. I knew that if I took a drive around campus, I would probably get lost there too. I could barely even visualize the layout.
My college experience was fine. It was interesting at times. It was amazingly fun at times, it was terrible at times. I guess in the end, it averaged out to . . . about average. I just went through all my Facebook photos from college, just to see if it would spark anything else. Mostly I remember what I was going through at the time of each photo: what hopes, joys, fears, disappointments, difficulties were with me at that moment, which no one else would see but me.
So many feelings in here.
As I began my Binghamton journey, things were actually great. I immediately found a group of friend (mostly roommates and next-door neighbors - go Oneida!) and I had tons of fun with them. Our dorm room even became a hang-out of sorts. After housing shifted the three of us around and it was down to just me and Amy (Andrea moved down the hall), we had space for a couch, and everyone would come over. I had a group of college friends! And we did everything together! We went to the dining hall together, went to the movies, went out to bars. We partied, we studied, we watched TV. We had a great time. I remember sophomore year of college as one of my best.
Our dorm room was hopping.
But things eventually became complicated. I ended up breaking up with a long-distance boyfriend to date a guy in the Binghamton friend group, and for a few months I couldn’t have been happier. Everything seemed just as it should be. But then the romantic triangle kind of busted its guts all over everything, and after that, it was never the same. My relationship with the group was strained in junior year after I broke up with their friend, and I was left out of stuff, I was lonely. I had fun with my then-boyfriend in Ithaca (we’ll get to that), but in Binghamton, I felt shut out. I still hung out with them, but it was never as carefree. When I look back at pictures from that time, I can still feel the tension I felt then - and the loneliness.
You have no idea how much angst I'm hiding in this picture.
In some ways, senior year was better, but in other ways it was worse. I moved with three of my friends into a house downtown, and we generally had fun together, drinking and going out on the weekends, occasionally hosting parties, hanging out. But I was single at that point, and I didn’t have a lot of other friends on campus. Luckily, I had my sister that year. And there were some good times. But I still spent a lot of nights alone in my room, watching TV.
My senior year housemates/friends.
So there you have it. My Binghamton experience in three paragraphs. You’ll notice that academics did not enter in the picture at all. That wasn’t because I didn’t go to class. I was a very conscientious student, went to every class, did all my homework, got good grades. But I was also smart, and unchallenged by my workload, so my schoolwork didn’t really impact my life in any significant way. Looking back, I see that I wasted a lot of time - I should have done a double major, or at least a minor, I should have taken more classes. I mean, I say looking back, but I knew even then that I would regret not doing more academically. But at the time, I was kind of stuck in a swamp of self-hatred, and I took perverse joy in thwarting my own best interests.
And as for Binghamton itself, I never developed much affection for it. The campus is beautiful, and I loved the nature preserve, but from beginning to end, it was a very generic experience for me. It was just college. And that’s what I wanted out of it, so I wasn’t disappointed. I had gone to Sarah Lawrence College for my freshman year, which was a time of great upheaval and emotional complexity, a year of growth and difficult transitions and change. SLC was also a place with a lot of character and quirks. Though I loved the academics and the campus, and made a few friends, it was also one of the most expensive schools in the country, and in the end I didn’t feel happy enough there to get into hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt for a four-year education. So I transferred to the best SUNY, figured I’d get a college degree at little to no cost, and be done with it. I wouldn’t have a transformative college experience, but I had accepted that by the time I decided to transfer.
So though I found Binghamton perfectly tolerable, even liked it enough to buy a sweatshirt emblazoned with its name, I never really bonded with it. My best memories are associated with my friends there and the things we did together. In other words, I don’t feel an enduring fondness for the place, which I guess helps explain why I wasn’t flooded with nostalgia upon returning here.
Ithaca, on the other hand - I anticipated a lot of sentimental reminiscing there. I had spent many, many weekends in Ithaca with my on-again, off-again boyfriend, who went to Ithaca College, and I loved the city, with its cute pedestrian commons, its pretty parks, its sweet Victorian houses painted funky colors. I had such lovely memories of Ithaca, of a cute, uber-liberal college town, and I was excited to return, which I did today.
But it wasn’t exactly how I remembered it. We must make allowances for the weather and time of year, of course; upstate New York is not at its best in March. It’s cold, dreary, cloudy, snowy, and windy. Unfortunately, Ithaca was not a sunny, happy exception. Not only that, but construction was going on in the commons, so it wasn’t the funky, friendly town square I was expecting, but a loud, machinery-filled lane chopped up by safety fences. And, weirdly, a lot of the storefronts seemed to be empty or closed. There weren’t a lot of people out and about (though why would there be? Recall the weather). It just . . . didn’t seem like it was flourishing.
And it was cold AF. It really was. It just wasn’t a nice day to be outside. So I did what any red-blooded American would do, and shopped. My first stop was Ithaca’s yarn store, Handspun. I hadn’t been there since college. And I hadn’t been in an actual yarn shop in years; all the ones near my parents’ house closed, and I started buying all of my yarn at Michael’s, which has a less exciting but (much) more affordable collection.
But as soon as I stepped into the yarn shop, I remembered why I love yarn shops. The colors, oh, the colors! The textures, the fibers! Ohhh, I loved it, I absolutely loved it. Actually, it occured to me that that kind of place, where you fully engage your senses, looking at and feeling beautiful things - deep, saturated, gorgeous, vibrant colors, soft, silky, fuzzy, woolly textures - is exactly where you can experience that ephemeral, mysterious “stuff of life.” At least, where I personally can. Anyone not interested in knitting would not have had any kind of moment there, I know. Luckily, I wasn’t with anyone not interested in knitting, so I was free to roam, to touch, to sniff, to drink in the colors with my eyes to my heart’s content. And it was lovely.
I remembered the importance of beauty, of beautiful, pleasing things. I remembered why I always used to buy so much pretty yarn. I remembered why my family and friends used to hate going to yarn shops with me.
Of course, I couldn’t leave this yarn shop without buying something. Or three somethings. But I have ideas for how I’m going to use them. Sort of.
Totally going to make stuff with all of these. Right away.
Next stop in the Ithaca shopping tour was an international crafts store that I used to go to with my ex. But after having actually travelled internationally and bought things there, I’m less interested in buying them in Ithaca. And then I just went to the used bookstore, where I spent a happy hour or so browsing. That was my entire visit to the commons. We used to wander around for hours, dipping into this or that shop, getting food at our favorite spots. But it didn’t feel like anything special this time. Not even driving around town trying to find a vintage store Andrea had recommended yielded anything but a half-smile of recognition or two at a spot I remembered. The place I had the most associations with was the Greyhound bus station, where I arrived on Fridays and departed from on Sundays.
Obviously, my experience of Ithaca was very different than it had once been. Had I invested an entire city with rosy overtones of funky coolness because I had had a boyfriend there? Or was it just really fucking cold?
I guess we’ll never know. Unless, of course, I return in the good weather.
I ended up coming back to Binghamton for the evening to see a movie with Andrea and spend another night on her pull-out couch. Tomorrow I’m driving back to Ithaca, though I’m taking another route, which I hope might dredge up some nice old memories. I’m going to do a hike (eek. I know. What am I thinking?) because there’s nothing else to do. Snow-wise, I’m just going to hope for the best. At this point, I can pretty much brave anything. It hasn’t snowed here for at least a week, luckily, since downstate got hit with yet another nor’easter, so it might not be too bad. Probably it will be bad, though. And in the evening I’m going to see Amy, who is now a mother of three!
So far, it’s been a cute little trip . . . but I’m kinda glad I didn’t decide to make it longer.