Tangled Up in the Big Red

"All the people we used to know/ they're an illusion to me now/ Some are mathematicians/ some are carpenters' wives/ Don't know how it all got started/ I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.'' … Bob Dylan

Living in New Jersey again has been disorienting to my sense of forward narrative thrust. I always thought my life's story should move me -- physically, at least -- to new and far-flung places. But little disorients more than confronting your past and present at the same time.

I should have expected the cold.

Ten years ago, I graduated from a school perched -- hunched, really -- on a hill in Ithaca, N.Y., the product of an ancient glacier that plopped down for some millennia on its way to the valley it was to form.

The school is a collection of ivy-and-rust-covered buildings in a most uncomfortably beautiful landscape. It was founded by a man named Ezra Cornell, and he thought: "Could there be a more strenuous location for my university?'' Likely, no. There it sits, and all others trudge.

I drove back there two weeks ago for the Class of '96 Reunion, and of course it rained.

I honestly can't remember a trip to school when it wasn't raining or snowing. Sunshine was out of the question. Other towns further north might get more snow, might get colder in negative degrees Fahrenheit or wind-chill index, but few towns can surpass the all-encompassing climatic misery that dominates Ithaca.

The seriousness with which most inhabitants/students take the university, is co-enabler in this particularly dysfunctional family. Solid months of head-down frozen slogging, wind-shielding, toe-numbing pain and despondency. And then there's the winter.

Perhaps because of the weather or just the prevailing attitude, the Cornell campus is one where eye contact is a precious commodity, hoarded away -- stockpiled for rare and disingenuous occasions.

So the reunion was an opportunity to exercise those old avoidance skills, while wearing a sweatshirt and holding an air-chilled beer on summer days.

I attended with a contingent of 10 close friends, whose weddings I've been and will go to, whose children I poke in the stomach, and whose money I borrow for the time in between winning it in poker and losing it at the next game.

I embraced and kissed other friends and acquaintances, happy to see them and learn the brief rundown of their lives. Some encounters jarred me a little. It turns out three guys from my high school class married three girls from college (I guess they're women now, even if that still doesn't sound right), and they live in and around my hometown.

I'm not sure how I feel about Ron and Beth living in Vicky's childhood home with their twin babies. Old, I suppose.

But also young. Having recently graduated journalism school with a younger crowd and setting out on a new career, I've learned you're only as old as you feel. And if I subtract the rapid aging that comes from pulling for the New (Jersey) Jets, then I'm feeling pretty young these days.

Mostly we drank and ate bad, wonderful things smothered with cheese. We stayed in the same dorms we lived in as freshmen and clogged the same toilets, smelled the same musty smells and mocked the monstrous construction transforming part of the campus into incongruous public housing projects. We stayed up late talking about nothing and tried not to feel tired.

Driving back to my current life, the roads stayed dry and I stopped off to watch a school buddy's baby crawl into walls with a smile wider than the Delaware Water Gap. I arrived home in Highland Park filled with curiosity about the future and warmed by memories.