Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Between appointments on Saturday, looking for a site for our wedding, my cell phone rang. It was an old friend, Attila the Pun.

He told me that he had run into a friend of ours from college, and they'd arranged to meet for brunch, along with another college friend, the next day. He asked if I wanted to come along.

After talking it over with The Gryphon, I called him back and said we'd love to. He told us where and when.

We met at the American Star Diner in the Lansdale area, which is a typical diner serving typical diner fare. It was kind of fitting we should meet at a diner, given how much time we spent at the College Diner in State College back in our Penn State days. When we walked in, I wasn't sure whether they'd be surprised or not. He'd been hinting that he might try to surprise the others with my arrival. I hoped not.

Fortunately, when we got to the table, Attila confessed that he'd let the cat out of the bag. This meant there were plenty of seats left at the end of it for us.

I could identify one of our old friends immediately. He looked exactly the same as he did in college, except with a different hair cut and possibly more muscle tone. I'll call him Mr. Smiley, because one of the most outstanding features about him has always been his ever-present white smile.

Here's a shot of him from college, looking rather serious. But it's a better shot of him than the photo at the top of this page.

So Mr. Smiley was there, along with his wife, who had also attended Penn State, although she didn't look familiar. They also had their 2-year-old daughter, an adorable tow-haired sprite who, with her curly shoulder-length hair, embroidered white tunic, embroidered jeans looked like a little hippie child. The look was completed when, after breakfast, she decided to remove her shoes and run around barefoot.

The other friend I'll call The ER Doctor, because that's her profession. She did look difference in the sense that she looked grown up. Let's face it; we're all kids in college, but I think that women probably change more in terms of appearance. In her case, she'd had Lasik eye surgery and was no longer sporting glasses. She'd cut her long hair to a shoulder-length cut that suited her face very well. And she was wearing makeup, which I don't think I ever saw her doing in college. Instead an oversized T-shirt (which was more or less a uniform amongst us college girls in the 1990s), she was wearing a fitted white blouse with jeans.

Here's a shot of her from college.

I wasn't sure from the look in her eyes whether she recognized me at first, but then I saw the flash of recognition as she met my eyes. I gave her a hug. We spent many happy hours together working on the club newsletter, for which she served as my assistant editor for several years.

Her name is such a common one that I'd never had luck searching for her, and she'd changed her name when she got married. Along with her husband, she'd brought her 3-month-old baby.

For awhile, we were talking to each other across her husband, who coincidentally also went to Penn State. He looked vaguely familiar. He was a member of the Blue Band and was a music major, so he knew a lot of our mutual friends. There were several people in the music program involved in the Monty Python Society, as well as WPSU.

Her husband eventually switched place with her so that The ER Doctor could talk more easily. I asked her if she could scan in some of her photos from college and share them with me. She'd been one of the few people who had a working camera in college, and she took some great shots documenting various events.

She said it might take a while, because she'd have to dig through things, but she said that she would do it eventually.

I worried that The Gryphon would feel left out, but he talked to Attila's wife and sometimes entered our conversation, too.

We talked about her job as an ER Doctor and what sorts of skills it involved. I wasn't surprised she'd gone into medicine, because she'd always had an analytical mind and was good with details. Like me, she had served as president of MPS, which requires the ability to gently steer the chaos. She was good at that.

I'd actually gotten in touch with Mr. Smiley earlier over e-mail through a mutual friend. He's living in the Philadelphia area and was interested in getting a group of MPS alums together to hang out. I told him I'm sure we could work something out, and we talked about tentatively doing something between holidays.

The time flew by as we all strolled arm-in-arm down Memory Lane. Both The ER Doctor and Mr. Smiley complimented me on all the weight I'd lost. They never saw me at my top weight, which came several years after college, but they did know me when I graduated from college and started grad school. At that point, I'd been about three to four sizes bigger than I am now.

After we paid, we went outside and Attila the Pun and I got shots with our camera, for old times' sake. I promised to upload them to an online album so they can view them and order their own copies if they want.

Attila the Pun, Mr. Smiley, The ER Doctor and me

Seeing them was a lot of fun. It felt like we'd just seen each other the previous week and somehow fell into a time warp for a decade. That, we agreed, is the test of true friendship. When, if you haven't seen each other for a long time, you can pick up just where you left off.

More about my time in MPS:

Dedicated Idiocy - A Personal History of the Penn State Monty Python Society

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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