Editorial

Celebrating ourselves as the school year ends

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Remembering the banal and everyday on campus

With my bank account hemorrhaging and the bags under my eyes large enough to be carry-on luggage, I’m walking out on this four-year-long relationship.

I’ll be back, of course. On some glorious day in June, we’ll be herded like cattle onto a stage and then herded back off. We will rent black dresses and pose for pictures and remember what the weather was like that day.

At some point, we’ll be handed a paper. Some of us might put it in a frame as a kind of feng-shui wall tribute to our golden years at the institution. Some might tuck it away.

Some of us will uproot and high-tail it back to our parents. Others will meander a little, settle in Toronto, or find another school in another city. Others still will settle here, adopt this city as their own, and upgrade from student housing.

But there are some things that must remain and never be forgotten:

  • Our full-bloom and wind-chill-warning campus, the poor ventilation, and the 1970s personality-comes-from-within concrete architecture;
  • The dysfunctional, yet prevalent red-brick walkways where many a texting pedestrian stumbles;
  • The once-residential houses scattered haphazardly around campus, with their creaky floors and shingled roofs;
  • The nooks and crannies in the Crop Science and Richards buildings where your seminars are called to meet;
  • The doorway lineups that, although inconvenient, remind you to slow down and enjoy;
  • Watching students walk, jog, run, and scurry down the bus loop at one minute before the hour;
  • The beautiful, red-bricked architecture of the Massey Hall, the J.D. MacLachlan, and Reynolds buildings as you make your way down Alumni Walk at the end of short winter days;
  • The delicious, overpriced, sodium-saturated food at Creelman Hall, that begs you to indulge semesterly;
  • The library cubicles lit up like the houses of a small coastal city against the towering bookshelves that anxious students pore over in passing;
  • The gentle, yet pervasive odor of the Dairy Barn as it drifts across Gordon Street towards Alexander Hall and the Science Complex;
  • The precarious, icy footpaths carved across Johnston Green in the winter, and the muddy ones in the fall and spring;
  • The non-engineering students that pass through the Thornborough building in a flurry of wet, squeaky boots and mystified gazes;
  • The cars that circle and circle again in mid-morning parking lots;
  • The Arboretum’s secret paths and swamps with its “No running” signs that most folk fully disregard;
  • The new Athletics Centre workout facilities that do not even marginally make us reminisce about the old workout facilities;
  • The March of the Penguins-esque feel of students migrating north from the bus loop or crossing Johnston Green through snow squalls in the dead of winter;
  • The Art Gallery and its enticing banners that make you think you should visit more often;
  • The building, academic, and organization acronyms that, although they have fully integrated into our vocabulary, still seem clunky;
  • The soft, somewhat grimy feel of a Bullring couch as you sit down and sink lower than you expected, and then embrace it;
  • The sombre hush of campus in the days after we find out that mental health disorders or diseases have taken one of our own;
  • The new shoes, the worn shoes, the muddy and snowy shoes, the click-clack of boots on the walkways;
  • The bunker-like feel of South Residence and the discrete confidence you gain by knowing how to navigate its halls;
  • The first time you enter Rozanski 101 and take your place among 600 of your peers under the harsh lighting;
  • The protesters, volunteers, and passers-by that fill Branion Plaza at all hours of the day;
  • The daily lineup for Starbucks in the library that easily parallels that of the bookstores during back-to-school season;
  • The two halves of the MacKinnon building that don’t fully connect, the divots and crevices of the Science Complex, and that poor tree that grows beside The Cannon.

These daily movements and observations have defined us more than we know. We reaped joy from them in the semester’s opening days just as we did in the darkest of exam seasons.

When we leave, we take these memories with us, but we know that students after us, and students after them, will see, hear, feel, and experience what we did in a lot of the same ways.

When we forget this, we risk the misportrayal of a generation. But we are vibrant and we are caring, and we see everything around us even if we don’t always sing through stormy weather.

We cannot forget that we walked and ran and rolled here, that we took the bus and the stairs and the elevator, the shortcut and the long way around.

There was good, bad, and ugly. But there was mostly good.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Photo by Mariah Bridgeman/The Ontarion.

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