I was told once by a very, very Irish friend of mine that every person of Irish decent in America absolutely HAD TO make a pilgrimage to "the old sod" ...Ireland...to visit their roots and to (literally) "touch the hearthstone"...that stone on top of the fireplace of the family homestead...that very real, very tactile touch with the roots that reminds us of who we really are and where we came from.
I did that last week.
And it was moving and rewarding at the same time....What was rewarding about it was that the University, where I spent some of my favorite moments of my misspent youth, seemed to understand that while they must, as an institution, grow and expand, they must also give the alumini something to hold onto...there must be a "hearthstone". Indeed they did just that.
Yes, it is equally true that some things changed drastically from the time that the "food Nazi" and I were on the campus...neither her old Graduate Student Housing (cough..hovel...cough) site nor my old Scholarship House were still standing...in my case it was turned into a parking lot and in hers, there's a new classroom building where the (hovel) House used to sit. Our favorite restaurant where we had our first date, is now a Chinese buffet. The famous Silver Slipper Restaurant actually burned down a year or so after we left and is replaced by a new facility which lacks the charm of the old place. But the truly important places that make the University distinct are still there and the administration has gone out of its way to make them prominent...
Let's face it....Tallahassee, Florida is not...definitely not...the first place I would pick for a vacation. The only thing which brought us back there was the family affiliation with the University which was rekindled after 27 years, persisted for 6 more and is now extinguished once again. At our age I don't know if we'll ever go back there, so there was a certain emotional reaction to our departure.
But I feel better anyway.
Because we "touched the hearthstone".
