Months ago I got an invite from my college friend Suzanne, inviting me to the fiftieth birthday party for herself and her husband, also my friend, Joe.
I knew this was a gesture since they live all the way in Ohio, but I thought Screw it, I’m going!
So on a recent Thursday I hopped a plane to Ohio and spent three fabulous days with some of my beloved college friends. I met Joe and Suzanne, who are now married to each other and have three kids, when we all lived in Gamertsfelter Hall sophomore year. Junior year, we moved into a house together with five other people, including Mark, who now lives near Joe and Suzanne with his spouse and daughter. While we didn’t live with Colleen, she is also a college friend from this crowd. She and her husband Dan, who attended OU for a year before transferring, now live a few towns away from Joe and Suzanne with their three kids.
We celebrated Joe and Suzanne’s milestone birthdays with a great group of their friends with beer, dancing, tater tots and hotdogs in the basement of a classic Cleveland bar. It was perfect!
Under red lighting, between yelling through the loud, fabulous, circa 1990s music, I looked across this crowd at the friends I knew from college. I reflected on that fact that we’d met at 19. We were babies! Figuring out who we were, what we wanted out of life, who we wanted to spend time with.
My college experience was a formidable one, to say the least. I think back on the person I was and how uncomfortable I felt in my skin, but somehow knowing exactly who I was at the same time. I hoped upon hope that the confidence would come. If only I could loan the confidence I have today to the kid I knew back then!
I feel incredible gratitude for the path I ended up on and the people I met. As we hung out in varying iterations through the weekend, it was lovely to find we still could carry on good conversation, sit comfortably in moments of silence just as we had as housemates, and talk about our lives and our views of the world today rather than needing to depend on stories of shared our past.
And we all have aligning political views which today really matters.
On the drive home from dinner Saturday night, I mentioned how cool it was to look across that bar and reflect how well everyone seemed to be doing. Mark agreed “Everyone turned out OK! No one went sideways and was unable to bring it back together!”
“The kids are alright!” I added
“The kids are alright”
These humans were my first photojournalism subjects. I have no recollection of any one of them giving me a hard time about documenting our life through those years (no internet!). That was a gift for a budding photojournalist!
I asked my friends to reenact some scenes from our college days and when I got home I made this video:
BEAN'S BABBLETORIUM 