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What BU Means to Me

By Shelley Uva (CAS’72)

We are tall and short, thin and not-so-thin, city dwellers and suburbanites, Northerners and Southerners, and one Midwesterner. We live in apartments and houses. We work in real estate, in government, in health care, in education, and in the nonprofit world. We are religious and nonreligious, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. We are Democrats (mostly), Republicans, and Independents. We are married and divorced and married again. We have eighteen children among us. One of us is a grandmother and another will be soon.

 

We call ourselves the BU Babes (well, some of us do), and this year, almost all of us celebrated the thirty-fifth anniversary of our college graduation. We have gotten together through the years, usually in odd years that commemorate nothing in particular since we are, as a group, pretty disorganized. Ten years ago, we planned a reunion for the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation. By the time we agreed on a time and a place, it had  become a twenty-eighth anniversary reunion. This year was different, however, and so, one exceptionally beautiful weekend in October, we met in Boston and reconnected with BU and with one another, and it actually was, for almost all of us, a thirty-fifth anniversary.

 

Most of us met freshman year at BU in West Campus. We lived in what is now called Sleeper Hall, which in those days was a girls’ dormitory, flanked by boys’ dorms. My daughter, Katie, is a sophomore at BU. She lives in Sleeper Hall. She finds my stories of girls’ dorms and boys’ dorms amusing and somewhat bizarre. Of course, she finds a lot of things about my college years amusing and somewhat bizarre. And in all honesty, so do I. It’s hard to imagine now what we were thinking when we ironed our hair or hitchhiked up and down Commonwealth Avenue. We are so lucky we never hopped a ride with a homicidal maniac. We are so lucky we didn’t end up bald.

 

For some of us, BU is a bittersweet memory. Two of our group went to nursing school, and their school is no more. Two of our group married young men they had met at BU, and those marriages are no more. Some of our schools have new names now. Of course, the BU campus is incredibly different. When we came to BU in 1968, there were no fitness centers, no Student Villages.

 

West Campus was three separate buildings, each with its own dining hall, and to refer to what went on there as dining is to be charitable. I remember a plate covered with an orange-colored sauce that glowed in a way that brought to mind science fiction movies about amazing shrinking men and fifty-foot-tall women produced by exposure to nuclear fallout. This ungodly sauce came with mysterious lumps. This was Fish Newburg, and it was served regularly. My favorite dinner, however, was the one that offered us a choice of egg rolls or liver. As we walked through West Campus’s almost unbelievable dining hall on a Saturday morning this past October, one of the BU Babes said,  “You know what this is like? A cruise ship.” And she was right.

 

Of course, some things never change. We came to West Campus at 11 a.m. and three-quarters of the student body was still sound asleep. We went up to Katie’s room and marveled at how familiar it looked — and how small! Of course, as reluctant as we may be to admit it, many of us were smaller in those days, but still…. When all of us had crowded into the room along with Katie and her roommate, I couldn’t help thinking of the Marx Brothers and that great scene in Groucho’s miniscule cabin on the ocean liner in A Night at the Opera. At any moment, I expected someone to knock on the door and ask, “Is my Aunt Minnie in here?”

 

The room looked familiar, and yet so different. When we attended BU, there were no computers (desk or laptop), no cell phones, no iPods, no Pilates mats (and no Pilates), no microwave ovens, and no refrigerators in our room. There were, however, plenty of ashtrays. In those days, it seemed as if everyone smoked, in the dining hall, in classrooms. The dorm in those days often was enveloped in a giant cloud of smoke, not all of it from cigarettes.

 

But I digress. Students these days may have healthier habits, but mostly what you notice when you look around a dorm room is the incredible amount of stuff they have. I came to college with two suitcases, a steamer trunk full of books, a guitar, a clock (not even a clock radio), a portable typewriter, and a lot of records (known as vinyl these days). I never owned a stereo system. I always lived with someone who did.

 

The surge protector was unknown in those days (we didn’t have more than one or two things to plug in). I don’t think I even owned an extension cord. I do remember these little metal coils that you immersed in a cup of water to make tea or instant soup. Eventually, they were banned, since they retained the heat and were therefore fire hazards. Several of us recall setting our desks ablaze.

 

Our memories of BU are as different as we are. Some of us remember wonderful classes with distinguished professors, the excitement of reading great books for the first time, the satisfaction of writing a paper on an interesting subject, the quiet fun of exploring the library stacks and sitting alone for hours lost in the world of ideas. Others remember college differently. For some of us, those four years were pretty miserable. It’s easy to feel lonely in a crowd, out of step with the people around you, as if you don’t belong here and never will belong anywhere. I suspect a lot of us spent at least some time in both of those worlds.

 

What I remember the most, I think, is the endless talking, the hours and hours of very late night conversations you think you can only have when you are eighteen or nineteen and still trying to decide who you are. You think you can have those conversations only when you are that young — and we were so young — but then in an instant, in the time it takes to turn your gaze from here to there, thirty-five years have rolled by, and once again, it’s late at night and you are all talking again, just as you did so many years before.

 

There is a connection among us. There truly is a tie that binds, and even when we have not seen one another and we have not talked for years, that tie is still there. Is it friendship? Is it love? Yes. But it is something else, too. It is the connection that comes only when you have shared some experience that, for better or worse, changed you forever.

 

I felt that connection more and more throughout our weekend. As we walked down Commonwealth Avenue from West Campus to Kenmore Square, it seemed to me that I was time traveling, and as the hours went by, I saw less and less of the women we had become and more and more of the girls we once had been.

 

We have been through many of what used to be called the vicissitudes of life. We have been through marriages and divorces. We have had cancer among us, and mental illness. We have experienced the deaths of our mothers and fathers. We have moved. We have changed careers. We have lost other friends along the way. We have lived through wars and elections, through the turn of a century, through civil rights and feminism and environmental awareness and AIDS. We were children of the fifties, and now we are almost past our own fifties. Our college idols are old or dead. Most of us have children who are older than we were when we met. We have changed so much. We have changed so little. We really do have almost nothing in common. We tend to agree that if we had met in any other place or in any other circumstances, we probably never would have become friends at all.

 

And yet …

 

I went back to New York by train on Sunday afternoon. I am a professional fundraiser, and that evening I was working on a benefit event, a recital by an opera singer. She also performed some Broadway songs. At the end of the show, she sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from the musical Carousel.

 

If you ask me, I probably would say that I am more a fan of Rodgers and Hart than of Rodgers and Hammerstein, more Pal Joey than The Sound of Music. I know, Carousel is not The Sound of Music, but somehow as the soprano sang, I pictured the wrong show in my mind — a line of children in descending size, inspirational nuns, and Julie Andrews twirling around on top of a mountain. Eventually I realized my mistake. Carousel is a much darker piece, actually much more my kind of thing, although not especially relevant to the events of the past two days.

 

And yet …

 

I know. It was a long weekend. I was tired. It is a very emotional experience to go back in time, to think about who you were and who you have become, and to share that experience with people who were there. It’s pretty hard to rewrite history in that context, although all of our memories are both faulty and selective. I could give you more excuses, I’m sure, but it doesn’t matter, because the fact is that at the end of our college reunion weekend, standing in the back of a room in another city, another time, another place, I suddenly felt overcome with emotion as I not only thought, but more importantly, felt, the connection that is made among strangers who come from different families and circumstances and grow into different people and live different lives, but still have a piece of one another in their hearts that simply cannot be denied.

 

And so I will say it. We never do walk alone.

 

What a gift Boston University gave to us. I don’t think any of us arrived thinking that this was what we would take away. We probably didn’t even realize it when we graduated that warm day in May so many years ago. But I think all of us do know now that this bond, this friendship, this special relationship, this human connection, is, in the end, the most special and valuable thing any of us took away from our four years here.

 

The students sleeping in West Campus when we visited don’t know any of this yet, but I hope they get to experience it. I hope that twenty or thirty or forty years from now, another group of BU Babes will visit this place and marvel at the smallness of the rooms and the changes on the campus, and later on, in a hotel room somewhere in Boston, they will sit up half the night talking about their lives and they, too, will feel that connection that no amount of tuition can ever cover and no college ranking can ever measure and know that this is the best part of Boston University.