Fiftieth Reunion, 2008
The clouds have parted — the P-rade will go on!
But not too swiftly. We wait and wait,
The fresh mud menacing our white bucks.
We are standing in front of Nassau Hall,
In the spot where we graduated 50 years ago.
“The old codgers have to go first,” we chuckle,
As if we were still 20-year-olds, not
The old codgers we, too, must seem to many.
The Old Guard starts moving and we crowd
To watch: They are, in truth, older than we are.
Some are driven in golf carts, but many walk.
Walking is not easy for them, but walk they do.
The crowd breaks out in cheers, in chants —
“33, 38, 43” — and we all join in,
Saluting these old men in faded
jackets
For coming back, for carrying on.
And now it’s our turn to march,
The mighty Class of ’58, 350 strong.
We stroll past Whig and Clio, waving
To the comfortable, familiar crowd.
But beyond Dod we seem to enter a new world.
The crowd is bigger, rowdier, younger:
It’s the seniors, the new Princeton,
And it looks like America really
looks —
As many women as men, almost as many
Brown and yellow faces as white
ones —
So diverse, so different from us,
This bunch of mostly white old guys.
But they don’t seem to see us that way.
They look at us with praise in their eyes.
They’re cheering and chanting —
“58, 58, 58.”
They greet us with high-fives,
Thrust cold beers into our hands,
And we clink our way down the hill
Through a gauntlet of raised cans,
Sailing down the hill now,
With this energy, this hope,
This love, really, driving us on.
At the bottom of the hill, our pace slackens.
We walk through strange, surreal
buildings
Sprung up where our playing fields once were —
Still more changes to ponder!
But we end our march in a field after all,
In a new field, where the grass is
perfect,
As perfect as the memory of this day.
