Reflections on my 50th Class Reunion

I never imagined when I was a student at Cornell College that I would be back  50 years later for a reunion.  That seemed beyond comprehension.  Yet, I was at Cornell last weekend at Homecoming 2017 and those of us from the Class of 1967 were honored all weekend. As a college freshman I could not imagine being who I am now….a 72 year old woman.  I struggled some to remember who I might have been in 1963.  It goes both ways…

On the long drive home from Iowa to North Carolina, I thought about the pros and cons of class reunions.  I also thought about my difficulties adapting to this small liberal arts college on a hilltop in the middle of the corn fields of Iowa when I had grown up in big cities in South America.  The gap in cultures was hard to bridge and I often felt like a misfit on the Cornell campus.( I went to Cornell to be near my Cedar Rapids relatives when my family lived abroad.)  I considered why I would want to go back. With persuasion from my roommate Terrie, an enthusiastic alumna, and the lure of visiting my cousin Julie in Cedar Rapids, along with my desire to show Art where I had spent my college years before we met and married, I decided to go.

Terrie, an enthusiastic alumna and my college roommate

Showing Art "The Hilltop" campus

There is a sense of freedom and total acceptance interacting with classmates you haven’t seen in 50 years.  Gone are the labels of “most popular”, “best looking”, nerdiest”, “super jock”, “brainiest”, and all those other names we affixed to peers and worried about when we were in our teens and early twenties.  Gone are the insecurities that come from youth and the preoccupation of “fitting in”,  and being popular.  It’s all easy after 50 years except for the strain of pretending ,when you fail to recognize someone you should have known.  There is a lot of peering down at name tags hoping you can read a name to jar a memory without succumbing to grabbing reading glasses!  There is much looking intently into people’s faces to catch some recognition ….shape of the face without the wrinkles … the gray hair, and people’s figures, most of which have become heavier and some thinner and more frail. There is surprise at seeing friends you remember struggling to get up stairs, and noticing many wearing hearing aids (something I am tuned into now that Art wears them). 

Preparing for dinner at the Elmcrest Country Club

I began to relax when I realized that 50 years is an equalizer for us all.  Just attending reunion weekend puts everyone on the same plane.  All the barriers we held up for ourselves and our peers in our youth are gone.

Having thought about the positives I admittedly am uncomfortable when so much focus is on our past lives.  That is when I am reminded of my own mortality. It brings to mind the question I don’t think too much about - ”how much longer will I be alive?”  But that is inevitable and a reflection of me as I tend to live my days in the present and future.

Most of us from the Class of 1967 attended a Memorial Service in Allee Chapel on Sunday morning in remembrance of those who had passed away.  We shared stories and reflections of classmates we had not thought of for a long time who had passed away too young.

“This will probably be my last time on the Hilltop,” I overheard someone in my class say.

“I probably won’t be back,” said another.  “Somehow a 55th doesn’t have the same importance as the 50th,” someone else said.  I silently agreed as I noticed that our class were the “stars” of the Homecoming Weekend.

Purple and White wrist corsages for all the women in the Class of 1967

Speeches at a 50th reunion, scrutinize historical, scientific and cultural changes of the last 50 years.  Welcome speeches include reference to all we lived through from the Civil Rights movementt to the war in Vietnam, the death of President Kennedy, the invention of the Internet and computers, the Cold War and Soviet dominance to the age of terrorism.  I was reminded of a 100th birthday party I had been to some years ago where the woman celebrating her one-hundredth birthday made an articulate speech enumerating all the changes she had lived through in 100 years. I was awed by her recollection of so many decades.

I came away feeling a commonality with classmates - all of us who had survived 50 years and were back on the Hilltop for the same purpose…celebrating our having reached this milestone. Personally I was reminded of my mother and father who had met at Cornell, graduated in the class of 1941. While browsing in the college library I noticed a new,  wall plaque listing all students inducted into Phi Beta Kappa since it began.  There was Richard Salda Sampson, my father, under the Class of 1940 - a validation that he really was here.  Reuniting with my cousin Julie in Cedar Rapids where we stayed for the weekend, reminded me of the love I have for my Iowa relatives  which began during my years at Cornell 50 years ago.  They were close by when my own family was far away.  I now realize how they have enriched my life in the last 50 years.  

Phi Beta Kappas 1941

Relaxing at my cousin Julie's home in Cedar Rapids

Remembering Past Generations...

“Wouldn’t our parents be pleased that we are together?” says my cousin, Julie with her lovely smile. 

“I remember what fun Mom and Dad had when Virginia and Richard would come to visit.  So much laughter,” continues Julie. “Dad and Richard teased each other incessantly.”

I sit on a black wicker stool at the kitchen counter while Julie cooks dinner and am overwhelmed realizing I am really in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Iowa is the place my family came during my childhood when we took long home leave visits to the States.  Mother’s family lived in Des Moines and Dad’s, lived just two hours East in Cedar Rapids. Fifteen miles outside Cedar Rapids is Cornell College where Mom and Dad met and graduated in 1941. It is where I went to college.  While I am trying to grasp the reality of being back for my 50th Class Reunion at Cornell, I am looking for that little girl and those memories of family so long ago.

Julie and I pick up where we left off which was only a few years ago when we visited her and Cam in Boca Grande, Florida, and when she came to Asheville for a weekend. Being with her in her large Cedar Rapids home furnished with many of her parents antiques and valuable Iowa paintings, I feel the spirit of all the relatives who are now gone.  My memories of Jean and Bob, Virginia and Vincent, Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc and even Grandma and Grandpa Salda are vivid. 

Julie finishes her dinner preparations and says, “Shall we go for a walk before dinner down to Grande Avenue?”

“Oh, yes!”  I exclaim remembering that the entire family lived up and down Grande Ave. from the time my father was a little boy. (Did one have to live on Grande to be family or is this merely coincidence, I’ve always wondered.)  We set out on a brisk walk about a half mile to Grande Ave., a wide but quiet residential avenue with tall oak and maple trees.  Many of the homes are old, all are different and have more land around them than most modern suburban neighborhoods. 

“Here is 2200 Grande Ave. - Mom and Dad’s house,” Julie stops in front of the two story white Colonial with green shutters.  Without the white picket fence in front I wouldn’t have recognized it.  I always remembered it as the American Christmas card house because Aunt Jean and Uncle Bob always sent a photo card taken with the snow and a wreath on the front door.  Memories of addressing letters to Aunt Jean at 2200 come back to me.  She was a wonderful writer and being a letter writer that I was, I loved corresponding with her.

Bob and Jean Vane's home where Julie grew up

A few blocks further we come to  Virginia and Vincent’s home where my cousin Susi whom I talk to often in Houston, grew up.  The house is now painted a dark brown and I am looking for the gray blue one as it used to be. Yes, that’s it, right next to Never Park.   I do recognize the bedroom with the corner windows in the front where I stayed often for weekends when I was a student at Cornell College. 

         Heading  back the other way we come to 2000 Grande Ave, Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc’s brown brick home with the pointed roofs like a gingerbread house.  It looks exactly as it always did. Libby and Lumir were my Czech great aunt and uncle (he was a dentist and we called him “Doc”). They loved us children whom they didn’t see often as we lived in South America.  A bit further down in the more modest end of Grande Ave. is #1619 where Frank and Anna Salda lived (my Czech great-grandparents) who raised my father from a baby when his mother died of tuberculosis. Grandpa Salda, who came from the Old Country and worked as a tailor in Cedar Rapids, was blind by the time I knew him. He died when I was very young.  Grandma Salda lived a few years longer but I was always afraid of her perhaps because as a little girl she seemed very ancient to me.

Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc's home - 2000 Grande Ave.

Grandma and Grandpa Salda's home - 1619 Grande Ave

House where my father grew up.

Julie drives me to the Czech cemetery the following morning, a place I have never been.  She and Susi did preliminary research earlier in the summer and mapped out where some of the family tombstones from long ago are. The cemetery is large as there were many Czech immigrants who settled in Cedar Rapids.   As I gaze out across the upright marble tombstone I see a large one, clearly visible from a distance with the name SAMPSON (my maiden name).  No one ever told me about this or took me here.  On the back side of the same tombstone is the name SALDA. It is here that the grandmother, Tillie, whom I never knew because she died at 29 , is buried, along with her sister, Nina, who also died young from the same disease.  Both left babies to be raised by others - my father was one. Grandma and Grandpa Salda are here as well.

When I lam with Julie I see her mother’s big smile which radiates a special warmth.   We have each often been told “you look just like your mother”.  And we do.  What I am aware of this visit is how we are not like our mothers but daughters of a much different generation than theirs was..  We are independent and talk more openly about family and relationships and agree that many things in our childhood were not spoken of.  Julie tells me of a little girl, a sister, who lived and died before Julie was born and was never spoken of. Julie and I are alike in that our focus is on exercise, healthy eating and living , continuing to learn, and staying connected any way we know how with our grandchildren.

“I just bought a book on football,” Julie tells me.

“What for?” I ask.

“So I can understand what I’m watching when I go see Jack, my grandson, play next week,” she says.

It is such a comfort to be with someone who has known me all my life. I know Julie feels the same about me.  We talk of how we miss our mothers, yet we don’t think of ourselves as “old ladies” and will not be defined at this age in the same way our mothers and grandmothers were. 

On my way back to Asheville from our stay in Cedar Rapids I wish more than anything I could call up Mother and tell her all about the visit.  She, more than anyone, would loved to have known Julie and I were together for a weekend catching up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa! 

A Birthday Well Celebrated

“Pick up Austin as soon as you get there,” were our instructions for when we arrived in Washington last week.   We dropped our suitcases off at the house and walked across the street to Miner Elementary School, with a real sense of anticipation.  Kids of all ages, black and white, were coming out from the playground.  Older children on their own and younger ones accompanied by an adult.  We rang the bell at the front entrance and were let in to sign in.  Then with instructions of how to get to the PreKindergarten After-School-Program classroom we headed down a hall. 

In the classroom a dozen children were engrossed playing with toys on the rug and right in the middle was blonde, curly haired, blue eyed Austin.  He looked up, and came over to us, his eyes big with surprise. We explained to the teacher that we were Austin’s grandparents and were taking him home.  New backpack on his back, wearing a light blue t-shirt, and navy shorts (his school uniform) Austin walked between us.  “Austin seems all grown up,” I thought to myself and it felt like a huge milestone to be walking him down a  school corridor for the first time.

Once home, we asked about school, took a peek into the backpack and his folder for class.  It wasn’t long until he was back to the Austin we know, eager to see what we’d brought - homemade granola, some new school clothes, and Lightening McQueen cars and stickers.  My iPhone dinged with the text from Jess at work, “Did you get him?”  And so our visit began.

“Actually, Grandma, I want granola,” Austin said to me. ("Actually" is one of Austin's favorite words). Then he was ready to take his scooter and helmet and ride along beside us in the neighborhood as he loves to do.

Saturday was my birthday.  When Austin came down the stairs in his pj’s, he proudly carried a beautifully wrapped present with a card addressed to “Grandma” on it.

“Happy birthday,” he said shyly.  “I will show you how to open it.”  He instructed me to open the card first. Then he helped me  take off the bow and paper to find a bound copy of this blog, “View from my World” as my gift.  Nothing like a 3-year-old’s enthusiasm to get this 70+ year old grandmother excited about another birthday.  That is why I had to come to Washington this weekend.  It was the start to a day full of celebration.

“Mommy, I want to make the cake,” Austin started in after breakfast. 

“We’ll get a cake later,” Jess told Austin.  That was not the answer he wanted as a birthday is not a birthday without cake-making and sprinkles. Austin loves to help in the kitchen.  He stands on a small stool in the kitchen next to Jess who gives  him a task such as cracking the eggs when she is making pancakes.

“Grandma, do you like sprinkles?”

“Sure,” I replied.  

“Mommy, I want to do the sprinkles,” Austin begged.

Jess managed to distract Austin as we enjoyed a late morning brunch at a French bistro, followed by a walk to the Library of Congress, despite the showery cool rain.

“Mommy, when are we getting the cake?” said Austin, impatiently.

“Later,” Jess said patiently.

It was nap time…it rained more. The day was dark, cool, and wet.

  Nap time over and Austin continued his refrain, “I want to do the sprinkles on the cake.”

     “Grandma, what kind of cake do you want? Carrot?  Chocolate?”

  Late afternoon we piled in the car for a trip to the grocery. Jess and Austin disappeared into the bakery and we picked up dinner.  The cake was bought.

“Grandma, there was no carrot cake. It’s chocolate,” Austin told me when we got home.

“Perfect.” I told Austin. Jess gave Austin the jar of red sprinkles and he carefully put them on the cake and helped add candles.

He was ready for cake, but was told we had to have dinner first and the cake for dessert. Another delay…

Finally the moment of lighting the candles came and Austin stood next to me to say, “I will help you.”  Everyone sang Happy Birthday to me and together Austin and I blew out the candles, cut the cake, and finally sat down to eat it. 

It had been a long day of anticipation for a 3-year-old  but I felt completely loved.  It had been a perfect birthday as shared through Austin's enthusiasm for celebrations.  What more could I ask for?