Here I am, driving off into the future as a freshly-minted college graduate; I only recently realized that this is not *the* Ramblin' Wreck that leads the football team onto the field (a 1930 Ford Model A Sport Coupe), but is instead a stand-in (a 1931 Ford Model A Roadster) owned by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. UT-Austin was next for me, but because UT's academic year began before Georgia Tech's ended, I spent an uneventful Fall '92 back home in New Orleans, taking it easy ahead of a January move to Austin to begin grad school in Spring '93.
The impetus for this retrospective was the need to do something with the textbooks and notes that've been cluttering my spare bedroom ever since I moved into my house almost a decade ago. Though I'll hold onto the stuff that pre- and post-dates my undergraduate years (until such time as I'm able to adequately document those parts of my life), I figure it's time to part with the Georgia Tech items, now that I've "immortalized" a handful of them on Facebook and leveraged them to corroborate the undergraduate anecdotes previously living only in my brain.
The books will probably go to Half Price Books - in the unlikely event I need to reference any topics covered in them, I'm guessing I'll be able to find what I need online. As for my notes, I dunno, a bonfire? Simply throwing them into a dumpster seems unceremonious, but unfortunately that's what I did with a trove that would've enriched this project (and my life). When packing up at the end of my final quarter at Georgia Tech, I inexplicably threw away the collection of letters my Dad had written to me during my undergraduate years. His crestfallen reaction upon learning of my thoughtlessness affected me deeply; the silver lining of this blunder is that I developed an appreciation for artifacts and the invaluable insight they provide - I'm now the de facto "historian" of Texas Student Media, with my pack-rat proclivity helping provide context to that institution's array of perennial topics.
Any sheepishness I feel about the self-importance implicit in my autobiographical activity is balanced by the reasoning that there's value to be found in a deep-dive into almost anything, even if it's only a small part of the whole (a moment in time, a patch of earth, a single person). Appropriately on-brand for a mechanical engineer (Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that), I appreciate the energy required to bring a bit of order to a corner of the universe, and express my antipathy for entropy by documenting and celebrating that anti-randomness, in hopes that some wisdom may result. So often, artifacts (and people) are lost or destroyed (whether by nature or by man), and the opportunity to learn from them disappears. I'm still here, and I held onto some stuff, so my story is what I'm able to contribute to the culture.
Looking up from my navel-gazing, some cursory research into the subsequent lives of my undergraduate peers brings me happiness, sadness, and humility. By the mid-'90s I'd lost touch with everyone I knew at Georgia Tech, so what I know about them now comes from what I've been able to find online:
Though I wasn't close to Andrew, my recollection of him is that he was a kind, thoughtful, good person. Small memories linger: me rhapsodizing about Mel Brooks to him after we walked out of an on-campus screening of High Anxiety; the two of us spontaneously scatting the opening to Gustav Holst's "Jupiter" after the sheet music was placed on our stand in orchestra class. It's heartbreaking that he (and Darren Strader, and James Freaney) are no longer part of this world.
I suppose it's unhealthy to look back at the past so much, if it comes at the expense of looking ahead to the future. I guess I need to channel my inner Janus and give proper attention to both the nock and the point of the arrow of time.