Memory lane (and its back alley)

Memory is a funny thing. There are those events, images, and sensations that are burned into our memory, even when they're trivial, and then there are those events that seem impossible to recall in any detail.

I've spent a lot of time being drawn back into a period in my life that wasn't really so long ago, but feels like a lifetime.

This week I went to my Alma Mater three times: drop off poster, proof poster, pick up poster and spend a day in special collections. I also stopped in at the department to see if they had an openings for sessionals.

I took the stairs.

I didn't take the stairs for my health, though I could feel the work of 10 flights, but rather to see how Leon is doing.

Leon first appeared in the 1970s (the exact date eludes me, but there is a footnote on one of the stairs referencing it). Obviously, Leon has fallen on hard times when his caregivers can only manage to pay attention to him in a spelling-challenged drunken state. Luckily for Leon, his last restorer was either too out of shape or too drunk to "restore" him past the sixth floor, so that upper floors are still pretty much the same as I remember them.

Leon's story begins in the basement, where he sees a light above that he's determined to reach. As he hops up each flight of stairs, his adventures reflect the departments he's passing. Some of the events don't match the floors anymore, since the university has grown significantly since his first inception. For example, his English department adventure only covers two flights/one floor, but the department had grown to one and a half floors by the time I started there, and I noticed now fully occupies two floors.

The restorations certainly reflect the times as well (aside from the orthographic challenges of new curses). "Indians" is scratched out and "Aboriginal" put in its place (though on the stair, it isn't capitalized, which it should be) and the last drunken caregiver got a bit too liberal with the annotations.

Curiously, he/she mis-spells bitch more than once, adding a 't' at the end, which I can only assume is an attempt to combine the older form and its newer one. Perhaps Leon should contemplate that one as he goes past the linguistics department...

I wonder how many current students know or care about Leon? When I ponder that question, that's when I realize how large that gap is between where I was when I first encountered him and where I am now. Leon is one of those common knowledge kinds of things that float around in undergrad circles, casually, as if they'd always been there. Knowing about Leon is one of those things that mark whether you're a newbie or not and being able to nod knowingly when someone tells you about this cool story on the stairs that they discovered meant you belonged. I am glad to see that Leon is being cared for, but the purist in me was a bit disturbed by the editorial revision and annotation that he's gone through.

I also participated in a sociology research project about single parents in post-secondary institutions earlier this week. It too reminded me of those days, but the memories there were a mixed bag. The interview asked a lot of questions about support and what the university could do to make the experience better for single mothers. The thing is, I'd never really thought to include the university itself in my attempts to meet the challenges of being a mother and a student at the same time. In fact, I remember feeling reluctant to speak of my parental status, especially to profs and other administrators because I didn't want pity and I didn't want special treatment. I wanted my academic accomplishments to stand for themselves and to be evaluated exactly the same as any of the 18 year olds in the class.

Not that that was easy! I really struggled through first year chemistry. Even though I'd taken it in high school and actually gotten a decent mark, the first year chemistry course looked like Greek to me. I struggled mightily with stoichiometry, which I swear wasn't invented when I was in high school!

But that's the kind of memories all this week has been dredging up. It also reminds me that I have no way of knowing what the future will bring either. If you had told me what my life looks like now back then I would've found it hard to believe. Which makes me realize how futile it is to try to imagine what kind of life I'll have in another 5, 10 years. I just have to take it as it comes, which is all that any of us can do really when it comes down to it.