Pre-mourning

[mrissa]

I get a Gustavus alumni newsletter via e-mail, so this popped up in my inbox this afternoon:
Alumni are invited to attend a decommissioning service for Wahlstrom Hall on Saturday, May 28 at 2:45 p.m. Wahlstrom Hall will be razed this summer.
Sigh.

I feel like I should go, because it was my home for four years, and its creaky, cranky, claustrophobic walls got to me, and I loved it there and fell in love and did all sorts of other wonderful things there, and people who loved something ought to see it go if it has to go. And much though I have had some "issues" with Res Life at Gustavus, I can't work up much of a head of steam to say they should keep Wahlly World. It was a wreck when I lived there. It's likely still a wreck. You're allowed to love things that are a wreck.

(Good thing for most of us, at one point or another.)

The thing is, when the tornado took Johnson -- yes, it all comes down to the tornado. Of course it does. What else would it come down to? It was one of those events that divided the world into "before" and "after," and I hate saying, "if you weren't there, you just don't get it," about anything at all, because it's my job to get you to "get" things you couldn't possibly have been there for, but -- if you weren't there, you just don't get it. Anyway, when the tornado took Johnson, they pretended it had meant nothing and didn't exist. You couldn't even tell where it had been a year later, and I don't think Res Life had any understanding at all of what had unified Johnson Hall residents, why they weren't just some random group of people. I think they deliberately avoided that understanding. So I'm worried about what they'll do after. I'm worried that they'll try to abstract out all the wrong things about it.

I stuck kana flashcards and Dylan Thomas poems to the bathroom walls. I scribbled who knows how many whiteboard notes. I shuffled around in bedroom slippers with mugs of cocoa or tea. I stared at the sickly pastel walls when I couldn't make my problem sets or my next scenes go. I twiddled the furnace dial as if it would do any good. I had a window seat pad made just for the windows there, even though the windows were only wide enough for my butt or gaaldine's and hardly anyone else's we knew. I got a gaaldine because of Wahlstrom. And a the_overqual. And a markgritter. And a timprov. And a ton of other people who aren't on lj. When we were squinting at the one aerial photo after the tornado, I utterly panicked, because I couldn't see Wahlstrom in the photo (it was off the edge), and not being able to see it was just one thing too many.

It's going to sound silly, but my slightly-younger geek friends were in Wahlstrom 202 when I was a senior, and my slightly-older geek friends were in Wahlstrom 202 when I was a freshman, and before I ever got there, Betsy's boyfriend Skippy and the rest of that geek horde were in Wahlstrom 202, and I had a sense of continuity from that. I ended up feeling like every couple of years, the right people would find the right place to be -- geeks in 202, geek stoners in 401, squirrelly freshmen in 205 -- and that was how the world would go.

I didn't have to be part of it any more for it to keep going. I don't want to be part of it any more -- I wouldn't go back to college if you paid me -- but when I was a freshman I opened my window to see Aaron practicing with a staff on the front lawn, and a couple of the senior SCA girls in garb waiting for a ride, and I knew I was home, and it was a kind of home I'd never had before, but I'd wanted it. I'd wanted that kind of home for a very long time by then. And if you were talking about SF while walking down the steps to Wahlstrom, someone you'd seen around but didn't know very well would probably join in, and I wanted all that for someone else. I wanted some other wide-eyed little girl to get to become a grown-up in that kind of place. The world has few enough refuges, and that was one of mine, and I'm not ready for it to be gone.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Wow. Pamela Dean really did write your dorm, didn't she? Even if it was set in another college.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. Pamela wrote about a college experience very, very similar to mine, but in a lot of ways the dorm itself was the least of it. Which is good: I can write some of my dorm experience still, without it being all Pamela-clone.

I think one of the things you're spotting here is that while we have some large dissimilarities, we are not, one might say, the most dissimilar people the world has ever seen. We tend to love some of the same kinds of things and talk about them in some of the same ways. There have been several things of which I've said, "I'll tell Pamela; she'll understand," and she has. Of course she has! She is the Pamela. And if anyone tries to sell her to the Mongols, we will outbid them.

When it comes to college in particular, this is not an entirely independent variable, since I read Tam Lin before Gustavus, not after. So my thinking about college, including my college selection process, was influenced by Blackstock long, long before I could be influenced by the Pamela directly.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Whereas I read it a few years after college and it was new then, because I am Old. I don't think my dorm was quite as cool as yours (for one thing, most people didn't stay there mroe than a year or two, though I stayed for three) but still, it had Lemurs, mad Ukrainians and beagle raisers, and enough people with whom I shared an initial that I once came home to find the whiteboard on my door reading:
Hi-
P.
Hi-
P.
Hi-
P.
Hi-
P.
Hi-
P.
in about five different handwritings, which for some reason made me feel loved, and I still miss it.

[laurel]

I'll mourn when they tear down my old dorm in Sioux Falls at Augustana College, too. It was such a huge part of my college experience, in some ways the only good experience I had at college was dorm life in my later years there (and being hall president and . . . lots of stuff).

I've been too shy to venture into it the last couple of times I passed through Sioux Falls, for fear it's already changed a bit too much, somehow.

I get very strongly attached to certain places, I guess. I'm extremely sentimental.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I haven't been back to Sioux Falls since my Gran died. I know I'll have to go again because either my Onie will make it to 95 and we'll have a party (devoutly to be hoped) or she will die and have a funeral.

I haven't been down to St. Pete since we moved back. I really should go, though, because my old advisor is still down there, and my old department. I'm going to e-mail Dennis about lunch now that I'm thinking of it.

Wahly World

[(Anonymous)]

I can't believe they're tearing down another one of our buildings! As I get older and see these things happen to places I care about (like the Chestnut Tree and now Wahly World), I better understand what my dad said when I was young about consciously not revisiting places he had worked and run before. His reason was that he didn't agree with the changes that had been made and would have done something different, but I think for me it's also the fact that in my memory there needs to be that place, and for it to be gone makes the place different and no longer mine. Even though I never lived in Wahly World, I have so many memories of all the great people I met and visited with there, probably more than of my own dorm, that it's really sad to see it go.

Heathah

[lthomas987.livejournal.com]

This is nearly a tragedy. I was of the 202 Horde. Class of 1995. I never lived in 202, but only by dint of gender. I cleaned there. I slept there. I lived there. I was proud when the only section with intact glass after the tornado was WAN202. I lived in 203, 303, 206, 007 in that order. I had 8 hellish weeks in Co-Ed before then. Wahly was a major part of my college life. I lived all my summers there too. Including the summer the painted all the rooms white, when we moved ever 3 weeks.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Wow, howdy! Cue chorus of "It's a Small World!" How did you find me? (And do you know how Skippy's doing? I didn't know him well, only through the lovely and violently talented Betsy B., and I understand they're not together any more and haven't been for awhile now.)

I lived in 203, 404, 304, and 001. (Yes, I got one of the double-sized 001 rooms as a senior. Envy my room draw prowess.) 304's broken section window during the tornado took out a poster of mine and some carpeting, but other than that, I was extremely lucky: my room window was intact. The physics junior office window also broke, but I only lost a mug there and had a bit of water on some of my books. Compared to some people's damage, it was nothing.

We bedlamites Wahlstromites have to stick together. Certainly there aren't that many other people who are willing to stick with us.

a friend of a friend

[lthomas987.livejournal.com]

kalmn let me know she'd found your post about the demise of wahlstrom.

who'd stand with us... nobody. I remember when I told my dad I was leaving co-ed for wahlstrom he told me not to go.. the weirdos, freaks and stoners lived there... He had a Pitmann (when it was Valley View) resident working for him at the time.

I haven't heard from Skippy but once or twice since graduation despite having known him since we were both freshman. As a matter of fact last I heard he was still with Betsy.

Re: a friend of a friend

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Weirdos, freaks, and stoners? Yep, that about covers it!

In my fiction writing studio, somehow it came up that the dorms had different personalities, and we were able to go around the circle guessing where our classmates lived with 95% accuracy (the one miss was for someone who lived in Link instead of North--those Complex types are all the same). When it got to me, the whole class hollered, "Wahlstrom!" in unison. Warmed the heart, it did.

markgritter was saying he bet he knew you or at least knew who you were, so maybe we have Gustie Bingo wins other than Skippy.

Re: a friend of a friend

[lthomas987.livejournal.com]

Yep. I know markgritter I think we were in a C/C++ course together maybe? I still live with toadnae who he should know. And shylabrat who's closer to contemporary with you than me, chem major. Hmm. I know lots of people but not necessarily where they are on LJ.

Re: a friend of a friend

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's sometimes hard to figure out whether you know people from their lj names (I don't really want to say, "Oh, yeah, I knew a chem major who was a brat!"), though I understand why some people don't want to use their own names. I'm mris at-sign marissalingen dot com if you want to tell me those people's real-life names; if you'd rather not, that's fine, too.

[pameladean]

Agh! How could they? The monsters.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Res Life never liked Wahlstrom. They never approved of it. They had the idea that all Gusties should be friends with all other Gusties and should Learn Valuable Life Lessons by being roommates and so on. They viewed the dorms' individual personalities with intense suspicion.

Also, really, truly, the place is structurally not very sound, and we've known it for awhile. That part I accept. It's just all the rest of it.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

My freshman dorm has since been razed, and I didn't see it go. I wish I had.

Your results may vary, of course.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have arranged to go down to St. Pete to have lunch with my old advisor. I will stop by and put my hand on the Kasota stone at Wahlstrom before I leave. But I'm not going to the "decommissioning," because it's Mark's birthday weekend and I would totally lose it and also because "decommissioning" translates into English as "rambly college pseudo-religious bullshit."

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Gustavus is my 'might have been' college. It was down to a choice between Gustavus and Wellesley, and I ended up going as far away as I could - but now, whenever I hear about Gustavus, I get that sense of having an alternate-world history there...