My Dad, My Day, Our Alma Mater

My father was a University of Pennsylvania student long before I was, and yesterday, while sitting along Locust Walk watching the parade of life and learning go by, I picked up the phone to call him. "Hey, Dad," I said, "guess where I am?"

"On the train," he wagered.

"Nope," I told him. "I'm out here, on Locust Walk."

"I'll tell you a story about Locust Walk," my father said, and he went on to describe an apartment building that he had long ago shared with a roommate. "He got the bed," my father said. "I got the couch. It was a good-enough arrangement."

I told him how the old apartment building was gone, replaced by a glamorous cathedral to academia, and how the apple vendor from whom I had, as a sophomore, religiously bought my fat-apple lunch was gone, too, and how nothing, really, was the same as it had been; and yet everything was also deeply familiar. The way the kids sat in the sun to read. The way the music poured down from open windows. The way the stacks on the fourth floor of Van Pelt Library still reeked of the same variety of dust.

"I love it here, Dad," I said, something, I realized, I had never said as a student, when Penn seemed too big and I seemed too small and I could not get my footing. Or maybe I am less afraid of living now than I used to be. Maybe I've grown more capable of joy. I'm just glad that my dad is there, and that I can tell him that, at long last, his alma mater makes me happy.