My last full day with Rhett and Natalie. Another “down” day for Rhett. They’re talking about driving together tomorrow on his “up” day to take me all the way to Louisiana to meet my friend Robert. A drive of at least four hours! I can’t believe their generosity. Nor am I convinced that Rhett can really handle this.
“No big deal,” he says. “I do this all the time to drive to visit relatives in New Mexico.”
For today, Natalie has plans again. We meet one of her friends for lunch at the Student Union of Southwestern University, alma mater to Rhett and Natalie as well as Donna.
Southwestern University is a Methodist university in Georgetown, approximately the size of Macalester College in Minnesota, my alma mater. Macalester is also a church college run by the Presbyterians. Both colleges have a definite secular feel about them, even if they are owned and operated by Christian denominations.
I haven’t been on a college campus in decades! But it turns out that Natalie and Donna often spend evenings at the college attending concerts and plays. After all, Georgetown is a college town, and Natalie tells me Southwestern is the oldest university in all of Texas. I detect some pride here. Maybe I would go to cultural events at my college too if I still lived in Minnesota. But then the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have at least twenty-five colleges and universities, with over 50,000 students at the University of Minnesota. Multiply each college’s cultural offerings and there is a lot to choose from in the Twin Cities! Not to mention professional groups like the Minnesota Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Guthrie Theater.
We eat the same lunch many of the students are eating, hamburgers. Natalie orders a portabella hamburger, expecting a hamburger with a slab of meat and a mushroom. Instead, all that comes is a mushroom on a bun! Welcome to college life in the 21st century, the age of vegans and vegetarians.
After lunch, we walk around the Student Union, then saunter around the campus grounds outdoors. The buildings, all clad with rough-cut limestone, have a feeling of uniformity, no matter when they were constructed. I find the campus very attractive.
We walk alongside a lush lawn with beautiful huge shade-producing trees. Dotted here and there are pretty wooden lawn chairs. “These chairs have each been donated by alumni,” Natalie says. In one section of the commons there are dozens of plaques on the ground, honoring former students who have contributed in some major way to society or to the college. One of the plaques is dedicated to Donna.
We walk on for an hour or so. Natalie points out the sorority she belonged to. We walk into the chapel, where she and Rhett used to make out during hours when the chapel was not occupied. She was in awe of this lively, handsome young man who was popular with all the girls, but for some reason wanted to be with her!
We wander into the theater building, where students are rehearsing a play Natalie and Donna will be attending in a few days.
I am puzzled by this attachment they feel to the college they graduated from. I feel no connection at all to Macalester. Is that because I graduated in the time of the hippie movement? Most of us in my graduating class chose to not even wear the traditional caps and gowns. Or did I inherit this disconnection from my parents? My father was matter-of-fact on the rare occasions when he talked about college at all. He graduated from Columbia University in New York City. Was he proud of that? It’s an Ivy League school, after all. I did know that neither he nor my mother liked New York City, the city I feel best in! Neither of my parents received alumni magazines from their respective schools. My mother went to nursing school at a hospital that doesn’t even exist anymore. She worked in New York City at a hospital belonging to Columbia, and that doesn’t exist anymore. My parents didn’t talk about college. Except about the college I didn’t want anyone to know I had attended, and that was the frequent subject of conversation between my parents. My parents donated so much money to Bethel College, they put my father on the board of directors and even gave him a teaching position. The president of the college and his wife had been guests at our home. I attended this college too for three years because it seemed like the obvious choice. But I was not happy there, and I was highly embarrassed to run into my father occasionally on campus. Even after I had married and was living in Germany, my parents would mention who they had seen at the Festival of Christmas, a music extravaganza the college puts on every year. I sang in these concerts too while attending the college, but never set foot in that place again after transferring to Macalester. I definitely did not want to be associated with that college.
But I was no more connected to Macalester than to Bethel. I knew that Macalester had a good reputation, but I also never let the alumni association know of my new addresses so they could send me alumni magazines. I was just relieved to finally be finished with college! The same thing when I got my MSW at the University of Minnesota. I graduated in absentia and never went back. Seeing Natalie and Donna’s enthusiam, I wonder if there is something misplaced within me. Why can’t I connect? I am the one who is disconnected from parts of my past others brag about. I wonder if this has to do with wondering where I belong. College wasn’t home. Where is home?
Interestingly, one of the singers in the choir I sing with now in Germany is from Minnesota. The choir director I sang under at Macalester, Dale Warland, is well known internationally. When I mentioned to her that I had sung under him, she said, “Lucky you. I never could get into his choir.” Of course, she meant his professional choir. I sang in the large concert choir. Still, when she told me that, I felt a moment of pride. I belonged to a good college and sang once under their renowned choir director! It felt good to have a brief sense of having belonged someplace.
We eat ice cream at Donna’s chic town house, in a housing development constructed specifically for senior citizens.
And then we leave Donna. Natalie says, “You haven’t seen Sun City yet! This is housing on an entirely different scale than where Donna lives.”
We drive past the center of Georgetown to a suburban development. There are homes here larger than the one my parents had built to accommdate seven children! This is the place retired corporate executives move to, intending to downsize. We drive past house after house, condominium after condominium, all built for wealthy or at least upscale people fifty-five years old and up. We pass people driving in golf carts along the road. Sun City has its own golf courses – three of them! Its own senior university. Its own cultural center, ballroom, activitiy center, artificial fishing lake, its own swimming pools. I read that this is the first home people live in after retiring, but not their last. This is a place for vibrant, restless people on the go!
I see one active creature here that is of much more interest to me than all the golf courses of Sun City – a roadrunner!
I am thrilled to see the roadrunner, the first I’ve seen in Texas this trip. I feel out of place in Sun City, though. It feels artificial and unnatural to live in a place constructed for and devoted exclusively to seniors. Rhett had suggested once that I might want to move down there. “It’s growing all the time,” he said. There are over 14,000 residents living there now, pushing up the population of Georgetown to about 50,000 residents at present. It’s growing larger, day by day. Georgetown is no longer a town. It has become a thriving city.
Our next stop is Lake Georgetown, a dammed-up part of the San Gabriel River, now a reservoir providing drinking water and recreation for the inhabitants of Georgetown. It is a pretty, very large lake, but lacks the pristine beauty of the lakes I knew as a child, spending summers in the pine and birch forests, camping along one of the thousands of lakes in northern Minnesota.
I learn that Georgetown is one of a few cities in the United States using 100% renewable energy. Talk about a green city! Texas is not at all what I expected. This is one of the most forward-thinking places I can imagine, way ahead of anything I know of in Germany. I can understand why people are proud to live in Texas, in a town turned city called Georgetown.
Our last stop is at HEB, the supermarket Natalie normally shops at. “We’re going to the ‘Mexican’ one,” she says. “I feel more comfortable there among these ordinary people than all trendy, hip shoppers in Sun City.” We roam along the aisles in a crowded, rather shabby but comfortable supermarket, surrounded by Mexicans.
Yes, Natalie and I are one of a kind. Neither of us would choose Sun City as our local neighborhood. But Georgetown as a whole, that’s another thing. After having spent a week in Georgetown, I can imagine why people feel at home here. But I have to move on. Tomorrow I will be in Louisiana – for the first time.
