In the Spring of 2021, with Matthew in tow, I made a casual visit to my alma mater, York College of Pennsylvania, and it turned into a deeply emotional, and maybe cliche, visit to a wonderful time of my life. I started writing this almost immediately after, but I struggled to get my thoughts into any kind of order that made sense. I am not sure I actually accomplished that, but with my youngest ready to start his own college journey, it was time to just get this out.

During my years at York College of Pennsylvania, I wrote a column for The Spartan, the campus newspaper. My first official column was just after going home for the first time during my freshman year, and I used “You can’t go home again” to illustrate a point. Through the years, my definition of home has evolved, but for four years, York College fit that description. In May of 2021, I returned home, just for a little bit.

Matthew and I were in town for a basketball tournament that he was playing in, a couple of miles from campus at the Fairgrounds. We had an early game followed by hours to kill before we went to stay with a friend for the night. Of course, a stop at the still beautiful campus sitting at the edge of town, I felt, was necessary.

However, before we could make that journey back, we decided to grab a bite to eat, so I took Matt to the Colonial Coffee Shop on the edge of campus. It is a place that, aside from the Covid Plexiglass, had changed very little since the days that Andrea and/or many other friends and I would get breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning. I don’t remember the food much back then, but the first of many waves of emotions washed over me as I sat in one of the booths with Matthew. It was a weird clash of a life from so long ago and my life now. To be there, 30 years later, with my son was surreal.

From there, we made our way down the street to the main gate of campus, and began the trip down memory lane in earnest, boring poor Matthew as I went on and on sharing with him about all the different echoes of the past I was hearing with each place we visited.

We first approached campus from Country Club Road, and as it first came into view, a spot I had keen affection for immediately caught my eye. I let out a “Whoa” a bit loudly as I saw a pile of pipes out in front of the MAC center. Matt kind of laughed at me and pointed out that they were just pipes. I felt embarrassed by my reaction because it wasn’t something I felt that was easily explainable at first. It was a knee-jerk reaction to what my brain initially saw as a desecration of a location of a sacred moment for me.

During the first week of my freshman year, when I was riding my bike across what was then a large grassy field, I stopped about where the pipes now lay to take in the cool autumn air. I looked back at the school with its bright lights and the low murmur of a busy campus. From that vantage point, I felt like an outsider looking in…almost as if the campus was inside a terrarium and I was on the wrong side of the glass. In those early days, my introverted personality made it difficult for me to adjust and meet people. Living “off campus” amplified this.

However, instead of feeling sad at that time, something about the cool autumn air and being on my bike at night, over a hundred miles away from family and friends, the independence that comes with all that felt empowering. In that small slice of time, I had decided that I was going to stop feeling sorry for myself and go after this experience of college that lay before me.

Long ago, while I was still attending the school, the MAC building and its parking lot had encroached on that spot, but now it was covered in pipes, an indication that more development in that location was planned, and it caught me off guard. However, after that first reaction, I didn’t feel sad about what that “sacred ground” had become. I became okay with it. I changed in that moment in that spot, so it felt right for that spot to change in the name of giving more students more opportunities to succeed in life.

When we finally ventured onto the actual campus, a number of unexpected emotions hit me as I drove and then walked around with Matthew. I should have expected them, yet somehow, I didn’t, and they hit me like a ton of bricks. They weren’t the sad emotions that I might have thought I would experience. They weren’t those emotions you feel deep down that want to pull you back to a time and place. It wasn’t the gut punch one might experience from being back in a place that you once held dear and can no longer be at. Instead, what I experienced were happy emotions and feelings of almost euphoric giddiness. Previous brief visits I made there left me with a deep melancholy feeling that I didn’t belong there and that time was rejecting me from this place…from home. This time, instead, I felt lifted up and overjoyed to be there, surrounded by the shadows of so many great memories and experiences. It felt good to be there, and I quickly became excited to show Matthew around (although his emotions towards this journey through time seemed in sad opposition to my own).

We got out of the car and walked up the side of the Iosue Student Union with the Waldner Performing Arts Center to the right. It struck me as odd, especially from that vantage point. One of my earliest memories of being at York College was the ceremony of officially renaming the Student Union to the Iosue Student Union after the previous president, and overseen by the brand new president, George Waldner. Then a bit later (possibly the next day or two…my memory isn’t perfect) I found myself in the Wolf Gym for an address by President Waldner prior to an orientation session. A few years later, as Executive Editor of the school newspaper, I had spent some decent time with President Waldner. While I doubt he would remember me, I certainly remember those moments. Now, seeing his name on that building struck a chord with me. Iosue was a man that I had never known, yet so many of the best moments of my life were spent in and around the student union that held his name. In my time there, the building with President Waldner’s name on it was the basketball courts, the swimming pool, and the fitness center. Now, it has been built up a bit more, I think, and has changed to a performing arts center. George Waldner was a man I spent time with and talked with, but the building with his name on it was unrecognizable and foreign to me, now, which struck me as odd.

However, that specific spot I found myself in was of particular importance to me, despite how mundane it was to probably nearly everyone else who has been on that campus. Standing on the curb in front of the Iosue Student Union, I looked up at the path that goes from what I knew as the gym up to the fountain at the “center of campus”. Again, my memory isn’t completely sharp, but it seems maybe the path was shifted a bit with the renovations, but my mind finds the approximate spot where I first saw Andrea. I can feel my brain light up the way it did all those years ago. In an instant, my memory sharpens and rockets back nearly 30 years. I can see her clearly walking towards the fountain in her tennis clothes. Both her backpack and tennis bag were over her shoulder. The now familiar look of being lost in thought on her face. I can’t remember if that was my sophomore year or my junior year that this girl first entered my consciousness, but it would be at that fountain in my senior year that we would meet for our first date.

To be there, in that spot, in that moment with Matthew, filled me with a nostalgic joy. Without that one, first random moment, I wonder, what are the chances he is standing there at all. The strange thing was I didn’t want to somehow magically transport back in that moment…I wanted to be right where I was, standing there with my son, and almost 30 years of other memories behind me, thinking about those first early moments of the girl that would become the love of my life.

However, this blog post is not a love story. It is about a journey back in time. I had met the friend I was staying with that weekend during my sophomore year, and he and I talked about it later that day when I was still drenched in the emotion of it and pondered how strange it is that four years out of my 47 years of life could be so impactful. As a writer, I am naturally inclined to inflate the importance of the subject that I am currently opining about, but I feel like I am not overselling it when I say those four years at York College of Pennsylvania were the most crucial four years of my life. And while Andrea would be the single most important “takeaway” for me from college, I only knew her in my senior year.

Prior to meeting Andrea, there were three years that would shape who I would become. There were three years of friends and laughter and learning and struggles and heartbreak and, well, just about everything that one might imagine from a college experience. There were some people that I would meet that I didn’t like when I first met them, and they are still my friends to this day. There would be others that I really liked and who I would call dear friends, but who have long ago drifted into the bittersweet fog of memories that you sometimes wonder are just dreams.

From that obviously very emotionally filled spot, we ventured into the bookstore (I ended up going a bit overboard on the nostalgia shopping) on the bottom floor of the student union. It was not there when I attended (I am actually having a hard time remembering where it was…in the Wolf Gym?). The bookstore was where the lounge was where I studied Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey and how it related to Star Wars. It was where I struggled with Howard Zinn by way of Dr. Avillo, as they opened my eyes to the origins of this country. It was where I would sit with a slice of cardboard pizza and a Snapple and watch other people easily make friends in my early days there, as my shyness kept me in a lonely little bubble. It was where I would later laugh and talk for hours with so many friends through the years, hanging out with the people I worked with at The Spartan. It was where, during my senior year, I would first work with Andrea, before we knew each other, and where the first picture of us together was captured by one of her friends.

The bookstore now occupied a place of immense importance to me. The time I spent studying and hanging out with friends in that location at York College was dear to me, yet I did not feel a loss of that space. It had long ago been lost. The important parts, the memories, the laughter, that time spent with friends, and the knowledge gained from those studies were still with me.

However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit sad at the loss of The Spartan office. The area of the bottom floor where it sat between the Yearbook office and the Ski and Outdoor Club was locked and apparently replaced with something else. If my memory serves me correctly, the last time I was down in that area, it served as the resident life or student activities office or something like that. Despite the changes, it was hard not to flash back to hanging out in The Spartan office until all hours of the night and morning, talking, cracking jokes, and working on something we all felt was important.

I want to say that my time working on The Spartan probably had a bigger impact on me than the education I received at York. I received a great education at York, but The Spartan is where I found my voice when it came to writing. It allowed me to experiment and see that my writing could impact others. As I moved through editorial roles, I became confident in my abilities, the decisions I made, and their impact on others. I discovered what I could do and what I could accomplish. In turn, this helped me become a better student.

I don’t remember much of the cafeteria food served on the middle floor of the Student Union. I can’t remember if it was good or bad, but there were so many fond memories in the cafeteria itself, and it tugged at me a little bit in that moment. I couldn’t quite figure out why. I wished I could take Matthew in there and look around and have a meal with him, due to how special it had been to me.

One of the first times going in there, I looked at the containers of cereal and realized I could have Captain Crunch anytime of day. I could have ice cream for dinner, if that is what I wanted. I could, in reality, sit anywhere in that room with a bowl of Captain Crunch, an ice cream cone, and chocolate milk for lunch if that is what I wanted. The cafeteria was an early introduction to what it was to be an adult, making your own choices (including bad ones, like having ice cream for dinner).

Stepping into the lobby outside the cafeteria, the echo of “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite, played by the college radio station one floor up nearly 30 years ago, crashed into me as I thought about hanging out on the couches that use to be there, waiting for friends (I assume the couches were taken out during Covid to deter hanging out…which is sad). Most of the time, it was for a meal, but sometimes, it was for a road trip, going to a store, heading out to a party, or any number of possible adventures. Sometimes when I think back to it, it feels like I spent most of my career at York in that lobby, creating such great memories. It seems to be a Captain Obvious moment to say that the Student Union was the hub of life at York College, with everything else revolving around it. It truly was the center of my life for four years.

It was still during the COVID lockdown on campus, and I probably should not have been there, so I didn’t walk around beyond the visit to the Student Union. I was pushing my luck and decided it was time to get back in the car and tour from there. I wished, however, that I could walk through Campbell Hall and just sit in the lobby like I used to while waiting for class and watching the bustle of people walking by. I wanted to visit the room in the MAC center where Andrea and I first talked. I wanted to go into the library and check out the study rooms and see how the explosion of the internet since I left may have changed it. I would have liked to sit at a computer in the lab where so many hours were spent on papers and projects. I wanted to stay on campus and soak in the memories and thoughts I haven’t had in 26 years. However, I knew it was time to move on.

As I drove around campus (and off campus), it was hard not to remember the excited walks to Murph’s Study Hall on a Thursday night in anticipation of the weekend. I thought fondly of my earliest friends, the girls who had lived up at the hospital dorms as I tried to remember which door led there. I thought about those times of hanging out, off campus, with the group from the Newman Club.

I passed another spot that triggered a strong memory, and I was suddenly back 30 years, on a beautiful autumn Friday afternoon. I was done with classes and was walking past the dorms to head back to my apartment when I ran into a friend. We talked a bit and they mentioned they were done for the day, as well, so we spent the afternoon hanging out and enjoying that freedom of not doing anything. It happened 30 years ago, but I remember that moment of freedom and joy like it was yesterday.

I slowed down out on the street and pointed out where I lived my freshman year. I was placed in a block of off-campus apartments that the college owned, called Country Club Manor Apartments, about a half mile from the main campus. Typically, freshmen are not placed there…they are meant for upperclassmen, but I assume they ran out of room in the traditional dorms. My car was about five feet from where I stood on the sidewalk, and waved goodbye to my parents. They were headed to my old home, leaving me in my new home. In that moment, I was both frightened and excited about the journey ahead.

I drove around the corner and showed Matthew the apartment I lived in with JJ and where Andrea and I first kissed. I also couldn’t help but recall some of the tough times that happened in the apartments. There was drama and heartbreak in the shadows of the past that I couldn’t help but acknowledge. However, some of the best times of my life happened there, and I couldn’t help but smile.

I drove down the road a bit, in the opposite direction, to an apartment I lived in after I graduated. I didn’t remember the exact address or what the front entrance looked like (we hardly ever used the front door), so I drove around to the back alley to find the distinctive spiral staircase that led up to the apartment. When I found it, I noticed someone either moving in or moving out, and I flashed back to the day of my own graduation…of how I moved my stuff into it to prepare for my first real taste of life outside of the protected bubble of my family or school. I don’t remember if I had found my job working as a bank teller at that point or if I had just decided to do a free fall into the void at that point in an effort to stay close to Andrea for her senior year.

Some of the most challenging moments in my life happened inside its walls, but I did a lot of growing up there. Again, I had wished I could pop in and take a look around. I had several different roommates while I lived there, all former or current students at York, and each of them, in various ways, helped me through that transition. I like to think we helped each other through it.

I thought of one roommate, in particular…John. We were friendly throughout college and graduated together. He was always good for a laugh. We often found ourselves at Murph’s or in the living room, drinking beer and commiserating over our struggles. He was trying to crack into radio and would work late shifts at a station somewhere out in the country outside the city. He helped me through some difficult times just through his remarkable laugh or the way he would tell a story.

I wasn’t best friends with John, and after one of us moved out (I think he moved out first), we were barely in touch. Years later, we would reconnect on Facebook, but we never shared that friendship we had when we lived in that apartment. John found some great success in this world and had so many close friends when he passed away a number of years ago. When I think about York College and those months immediately after graduation, I can’t help but think about him with a smile.

Places like the Country Club Manor Apartments, Andrea’s apartment when I first met her, and Murph’s Study hall had changed very little. However, there were some places that changed so much that I only recognized the contour of the road that led up to it, or something familiar about a rock or a set of trees. Landmarks had disappeared to progress, but the roads curved, turned, rose, and fell the same way. Some things never change, like the front door of Andrea’s apartment, her senior year, and the weird spiral staircase out of my old apartment.

These changes carried over to campus, where so much remained the same while so much had changed. Buildings had grown, and roads and paths that I knew now terminated at these buildings.

I thought about Tyler Run Creek, which meanders through campus. It starts out beyond the walls of the college in the city. It makes its way onto campus somewhere out past the old track and makes its way through the heart of the campus. She flows within sight of some of the freshmen dorms, past a few of the athletic fields, and within sight of Broughal Chapel. Giant, beautiful willow trees try to dip their branches into her waters before she passes under the bridge. She passes over the road and close to the Performing Arts Center before she sort of disappears behind the student apartments named after her. Soon after, she flows out of campus and under Jackson Street, the road that many students live in their final year or two of school. She wanders away from campus, where she eventually connects with Codurus Creek. The Codorus finds her way out to the mighty Susquehanna, who, in turn, finds her way down to the Chesapeake Bay and out into the Atlantic Ocean and the world.

It’s not difficult to see the metaphor here, and it reminded me of not just the passage of time but also the passage of people through the school.

I think my strongest lasting impressions of York College are the friends, people, and professors I encountered along the way. While my family – Andrea, and the boys – are a direct result of York College, there were so many people I encountered who would have a lasting impression on me. For some, the friendships ended long ago. For others, friendships are held only through Facebook. For a very few, I still keep in touch with them.

One day, early on in my freshman year, I sat by myself and ate breakfast, I think. I forget if it was early or late, but the cafeteria was mostly empty when a guy came up and started talking to me. I don’t know if it was out of pity or interest, but he was friendly. He would become one of the most important friends I would ever have as he helped me get through those early days and introduced me to others who would influence who I would become. We would go on to become roommates; however, our friendship wouldn’t survive our freshman year. Despite how that friendship ended, I will never forget his impact.

He would introduce me to the “Hospital Girls”, a group of girls who lived in the nurses’ dorms across the street from the college. Even as he phased out of my life, they held strong and became some of my dearest friends. They taught me so much about life over the course of the four years there, and then beyond. I think fondly of each and every one of them and about the individual friendships I had with each of them and they had with each other. I learned about how different types of bonds keep different people together and, sadly, about the different wedges that drive people apart. I learned from them forgiveness. Ultimately, time and distance were not kind to the group of friends as a whole, but different individual friendships still hold strong. When I look back at my time with those girls, all I can think of is the laughter that echoed through the halls of the hospital dorms, the lessons in life they taught me, and the confidence they helped build in me. That would be the confidence I would need to do the other things, like The Spartan and the Newman Club.

There would be others that I really liked and who I would call dear friends, but who have long ago drifted into the bittersweet fog of memories that you sometimes wonder are just dreams.

Relationships often cause domino effects. One person introduces you to another person, that person introduces you to another, and so on. This often happened in college. It was through the Hospital Girls that I would meet my best friend from college. It was in such a weird and random moment that I met him, that I still think about it often (and it’s too unnecessary to explain here). It would be some time after that before our friendship was truly forged, but he is someone I am still close with. We text from time to time. He has spent vacations with my family and me. My sons see him as almost an uncle.

The more I drove and walked around campus, the more I realized that it wasn’t the places themselves that drove my emotions. It was the memory of the people I encountered during my four years at York. It was the echoes of my friends, acquaintances, and professors reverberating through time and bouncing around these buildings.

It wasn’t the classrooms and hallways of the MAC center, Campbell Hall, and the Annex that opened my mind. It was the professors who took their time to make sure students understood. It was professors like Dr. Avillo who were about as tough as they come at York, but who welcomed you into their offices and spent the time answering your questions and explaining concepts to you. It was teachers like Senor Gingrich who would patiently help you put together a sentence in Spanish without making you feel stupid. It was men like Professor Briggs who took his real-world experience and shared it with us with all the enthusiasm of a circus ringmaster.

It wasn’t the actual cafeteria that tugged at me, but the memories of all the people I encountered at York College. Dinner is a meal, more than others, that is spent with family. And for four years, the friends I had at York College were family, and all those meals became so important. Not everyone could make these meals all the time, but that was what was great about them, as different people came in and out of those meals. People from different walks of life, different backgrounds, and different experiences, coming together to share a meal. It didn’t matter what the meal was…it was the people that I shared it with.

It wasn’t the music that drifted down from the radio station, the couches, or the structure that made the lobby of the Student Union so special. It was the anticipation of meeting up with friends and what adventures we might have. It was knowing that you were meeting with people you could confide in, talk with, and try to tackle problems with. It was a launch pad for these friendships and relationships in the school.

It wasn’t the cafeteria, but the friends I met and enjoyed meals with there that brought on the emotions. It wasn’t the apartments that I called home. It was my first roommates who were seniors and took me under their wings, and the guys I would eventually room with, and the one who would eventually become my best friend, who were home. It wasn’t The Spartan office I missed, but the people with whom I worked hard and laughed with and even fought with as we tried to produce something we were proud of. It wasn’t the Newman Club office I missed, but the conversations with the two priests, whom I would still call friends to this day, as well as the group of people I discovered, and whom I would spend not just spiritual moments with, but some of the best times of my life. It wasn’t the dorms of the hospital I missed, but the girls I met there who would become some of my earliest and closest friends and with whom I would share joy and happiness and heartbreak with.

It wasn’t the college newspaper that helped me find my voice and confidence. It was the trust of my editors and eventually the people I would work with that helped me build my confidence. My biggest memories at the paper were the debates and the discussions I had with those individuals. It was little moments of laughter in the middle of the night, running up against a deadline. It was lazy afternoons between classes, listening to the girls laugh as they wrote the horoscopes.

Maybe I was wrong to earlier state that this was not a love story. While I would find the love of my life at York College, I also fell in love with that campus and that city and, more importantly, all those people I encountered along the way. All those people that helped me, even in the smallest ways; all those people I shared a laugh or a tear with; all those people I studied, partied, and prayed with. All those random, nameless people I encountered in a normal day. I love the way they affected my life, whether I am still in touch with them to this day or not.

My journey away from York College of Pennsylvania has been incredible. It took me from York to Baltimore to New York, catching my dreams of working in Major League Baseball, securing the love of a wonderful woman, and becoming what I really was truly meant to be, a father. There are still some dreams to chase…some promises I made to myself all those years ago that still need to be fulfilled. In most ways, I feel, I am more than what I had envisioned for myself back then, but in other ways, less. And it is that last part that I am still chasing, and somehow I feel it was this trip to York College that will get me there, after reminding me of those promises I made to myself.

The shadows of all those people that touch my life back then, still make their way through my heart and soul and the echoes of their laughter and voices still bounce around my brain, bring with them that joy I felt all those years ago.

I owe so much of the happiness in my life to York College and the people I found there.