Each time I’m able to walk on my old college campus, Miami University, of course, it’s a bit of a sentimental journey, as so many thoughts run on my cerebral loop. And, whenever, I need to visit southern Ohio for business, as I do in my role as a customer-service rep for Mid-American Cleaning Contractors, I’m often drawn to the campus to traverse the famous Slant Walk.
The urge to walk the campus is often so much stronger in the weeks before fall classes begin and in the weeks after the traditional school year ends in late spring. When school is in session, I generally don’t intrude on the young people’s turf, feeling as if, somehow, I don’t belong. So, there I was in early August, a few weeks before fall session, gathering my 1969-73 wool and knitting memories as I ambled.
Much about that which runs through my mind, I’ll admit, is sprinkled liberally with some pretty morbid thoughts, as in the knowledge that the number of years I’ve lived has the alligator-jaws math symbol facing it with the number of years I’ve left behind it.
Attempting to drive that depressing deliberation from my head, when I saw Upham Hall, where so many of my English classes convened, I thought of my favorite college professor, Milton White, who taught a short-story course that was so engaging that I, to this day, remember and practice so many of the techniques in writing narrative prose effectively.
I also thought as I passed King Library, that were I a better student, I’d have been in there more. Nonetheless, I did recall some evenings in King working on a paper in the stacks in those pre-Google dark ages, no doubt, grumbling that I had this stupid paper I had to finish when I’d have rather been further up Slant Walk at The Purity, my favorite suds hangout, with my boys.
The memories evoked when I return to my campus always bring a bit of a tremble to my bottom lip, a bit of tightness to my throat and a bit of mist to the corners of a pair of eyes that have peered at life’s absurdities for some 65 years.
The moisture never really develops into anything that cascades down my cheeks. I always stop myself before that ever happens, because mournful tears should only be reserved for serious moments, not merely because so much of time’s sand has already slipped through the narrow neck of an hourglass.
My early-August after-dinner walk was serene, and I did what I generally do when the campus is deserted, which is to count the total number of students I see. You might be interested to know that, this time, there were 14 total, and while I hardly see myself as someone on the cutting edge of pop-culture technology, I do know what every single one of these young folks were doing.
All 14 walked in almost zombie-like fashion, with their iPhones thrust at arm’s length and eyes glued to the screen, searching for Pokémon. Those who study pop-culture trends tell us Pokémon Go is indeed a global phenomenon and, currently, the world’s most popular mobile game.
I chuckled a bit watching them walking so slowly while fixating on their phone screens. First, what amused me was that 43 years after my Miami moments that I’d be walking the campus as an old dude in my mid-60s. Second, I was amused by the fact that were the 21-year-old me back in the day ever allowed a glimpse into a sliver of the future, I’d have been utterly baffled as to what these young people were holding and what they were doing.
Then I began to think what possibly in my era of Vietnam War protesting and Kent State shootings would have been any sort of craze-inducing equivalent of a game that captivated my boys and me as Pokémon Go does today’s youth.
In an era long before electronics and iPads and such, what I finally settled on, and this is certainly going to date me, is by the time I was a senior, The Purity installed an air-hockey game. I remember my mates and I put our quarters in the slots on the table’s edge and patiently waited our “ups” between swigs to practice our mighty bar hand-eye coordination as we vied for dominance in firing that hard plastic red disk into our opponent’s slot.
And, from those times where whispers of air kept that plastic disk in motion even when we weren’t whacking it to today, when groups of young twenty-somethings search for Pokémon, it all happened in just about three blinks of an eye.
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