The weekend before graduation, Princeton University transformed itself into a many-ringed circus. Everyone other than seniors had already left for the summer, their now-vacant dorm rooms rented out to thousands of alumni who returned to campus for the school’s annual reunion. In all the major courtyards across campus, enormous tents had been erected, under which, for three days, alumni and their families would be treated to gluttonous meals, live music, dancing, and unlimited alcohol, all in the service of maintaining strong ties between the university and its alumni—and, some would readily admit, encouraging alumni donations.
It really was some party, though. The rumor was that it was second only to the Indianapolis 500 in terms of kegs of beer consumed. Three days of parties, of games for the kids, guest lecturers for the scholarly minded, service projects for the service project–minded, three days of reuniting with lost friends, lost loves, three days of social (and, it would be fair to say, sexual) intercourse, and all of it culminating in a parade—called, naturally, P-rade—where Princetonians wore their orange-and-black garb (each reunion class having come up with its own themed clothing, strangely a source of little embarrassment to accompanying spouses) and marched through campus just as previous generations had marched before them. Leading the P-rade was the oldest living alumnus, riding beside the university president in an orange and black golf cart. Bringing up the rear an hour or so later were eleven hundred inebriated, raucous graduating seniors staggering their way toward the end of college and the beginning of the rest of their lives.
Alumni and their families traveled far and wide to be here. Watching them, we couldn’t help imagining ourselves in five or ten or twenty years, returning with our own spouses, many of whom we hadn’t yet met, with our children whose births were still years away. We wondered what our future selves might be like, and what we’d think of them. And we wondered what that older self might have in the way of advice or wisdom for a twenty-one-year-old just now on the threshold of leaving the security of this privileged place.
Quickly, though, we stopped wondering and started partying. Final exams were done, senior theses turned in, and so we drank. And then we drank some more. Thursday, Friday, then the P-rade on Saturday. By Sunday we were wiped out. The alumni were leaving. By dinner they were gone, all twenty thousand of them. The circus had left town, and now only the tents remained. Late Sunday night, against official university policy and at the risk of getting injured or, worse, busted by campus police so close to graduation, several of us planned to adhere to another Princeton tradition.
We would go tent sliding.
The idea was to boost one another up onto one of the tents, crawl up to its apex, and slide down again on the steep mountain of thick canvas, ideally stopping before reaching the edge and the ensuing eight-foot drop to the grass below.
I’d never done this before. But a group had planned to meet up at midnight and head over to the fifth-reunion tent, the largest on campus. It had started to drizzle earlier, the first time in days, and we hoped the water would add an element of speed to the descent.
At nine thirty, Sara phoned my room and asked if I’d seen Jeffrey. I told her not since dinner.
“That’s weird,” she said. “He was hanging out in my room, but when I came back from taking a shower he was gone.”
She didn’t sound overly concerned, though. They were the rare couple, I’d noticed, that hadn’t become strained as graduation neared. It seemed that graduation was rarely a time of unity. More often it caused outright breakups or, for the warmer of heart, vague promises of long-distance relationships. We were an ambitious bunch, eleven hundred Jack-in-the-boxes full of potential energy, just waiting to be sprung upon the world. This was no time for diversions, no time for compromise. All we had to do was to follow the path that our education had cleared for us. Even a good campus romance, even love, had little force to deflect the pull of an acceptance to a top medical school or a plum job at a New York consulting firm.
Jeffrey and Sara were an exception. On Tuesday they would be shipping all their belongings, except for a suitcase or two, to their respective parents’ homes, and then casting off together in Jeffrey’s boat of a car, his 1982 Ford Taurus station wagon with 150,000+ miles, bound for San Francisco. There he would program computers—though he really didn’t know very much about programming computers—for a company so new and underfunded that the CEO, a twenty-six-year-old UCLA dropout, carried his coffeemaker from home to work every day so the company wouldn’t have to spend twenty dollars on another one. (Jeffrey had told me this detail, one of many that he found charming rather than alarming, upon his return from interviewing there. He interviewed at several other companies, too, but had liked this one best. They think big, he’d explained.) Sara wanted to spend the next year or two working on a novel. Once she and Jeffrey settled somewhere, she’d take part-time work—as a barista or maybe a bartender—for extra money.