A Photograph From Rolling Stone (Or: A Sobering Reminder of How the Distant Past Becomes More Distant Each Day)

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So Tom Flaherty, I guy with whom I went to college, posted this photograph on Facebook. It's a picture of guitarist Jack White. In the background is a young woman, probably about 20, give or take.

Considering that this was a post from someone with whom I went to college, a flood of memories came back, and for about five seconds there, I was back at the University of Massachusetts, in the Butterfield dorm (more about that later).

And then the photograph's caption caused any of those college thoughts to implode:

"Hey, that's my daughter with Jack White in the new issue of Rolling Stone."

For a moment I just sat there.

Daughter? One of my contemporaries now has a college-age daughter?

For a few seconds, I just thought to myself: no, this cannot be. I cannot be this old.

But, of course, it is, and I am.

This isn't the first time I've had other people's kids crowd in on my memories of the past, of course. A friend of mine has kids who are now teenaged, and whenever he talks about them, it takes me back to when I was teenaged, when every moment was high drama, and everything, everything, everything was of the greatest importance. Still, though, none of my friends and acquaintances had a kid who was a true adult.

Until now.

I could tell from the comments on the photograph that I wasn't the only one who felt a surreal sense of the past and present existing at the same time. We were all happy for Tom, and all equally happy for his daughter, Fiona. At the same time though, and I mean this with the utmost kindness, there were some of us who were a bit freaked out.

To understand why, it's probably best to understand the memories that mill around in my head when someone or something comes along to stir up thoughts of my years at UMASS. These are for me the first memories I have of feeling like an adult, as if other adults finally treated me as one of them. It was the first time that I would speak to people decades older than me and feel as if I were not a child speaking to an adult, but an adult speaking to a contemporary.

This is only part of it, however. During my years at UMASS, I took many classes I enjoyed, and I still remember them. More than that however, there was something else about my years at UMASS that made them truly memorable: like Tom, and like many others who posted comments when Tom posted that picture from Rolling Stone, I lived in the Butterfield dorm.

The Butterfield dorm still exists at UMASS, but it is not what it once was. When I went there, the dorm had its own dining room in the basement, and students often worked there, myself included. This arrangement in what was far and away the smallest dorm on campus caused you to meet everybody in the dorm, which led to a community atmosphere not found in other dorms.

But this scholarly antiseptic description of Butterfield doesn't in any way hint at what a wonderful place it was to spend a couple of years of your life.

There are not many college residences that inspire a wiki, a MySpace page, and a Facebook group. Somehow, if you lived there up until about 1993, you find yourself talking about the place should the conversation turn to college experiences.

I have friends today that I met at that dorm. Butterfield was like that. You'd meet people--usually over a 1 A.M. game of pool in the rec room that was adjacent to the dining room--and the next thing you knew, three hours had gone by, you had played countless rounds of eight ball, and you now had a friend. That's the way it was.

Yes, there were aspects of the dorm that were annoying. There was a politically correct atmosphere long before that expression even came into being, and it could be stifling. Also, because of its small size and highly social structure, everyone knew everyone else's business, often before the person in question even knew their own.

Still, these were small prices to pay for a dorm in which everyone, it seemed, had something interesting to discuss, every other person played a musical instrument, and every fourth person drew and painted.

The place definitely had an Island of Misfit Toys quality to it, in which outcasts of all affiliations coexisted. Though the dorm had a reputation as a "hippie" dorm--whenever The Grateful Dead played nearby, the dorm emptied out for the weekend as dozens of students went to follow them--it was more like a dorm for decidedly different people, in which, for the most part, everyone was just allowed to be themselves.

I inhabited the figurative dark places in that dorm. It was I who clipped out articles from Jay Robert Nash's crime encyclopedia Bloodletters and Badmen and posted one article a week, calling it my "mass murderer of the week wall." Whenever the week was over, all types of people--hippies, punks, buttoned-up preppies--asked me who the next mass murderer would be. Richard Speck? Howard Unruh? Ed Gein? Albert Fish? Good times, good times.

Then there were the coffeehouses. Every couple of months, a whole bunch of students would perform in the dining room. There was an incredibly talented guitarist named Henning Ohlenbusch who never, it seemed, stopped playing his guitar. Together we wrote a series of sick rock operettas, all of them usually involving someone taking revenge on a bad person in a bloodthirsty way.

I never really knew joy until we had a room full of hippies screaming gleefully as Billy, the small, bullied hero of one of these pieces, enlisted the help of an evil clown to dispatch various members of the football team and cheerleading squad. The profound title of this work was "The Clown," and I will always be distinctly proud of that piece of writing. Once again: good times, good times.

(Henning, by the way, continues to make music in the Amherst/Northampton area. You can check out his band, School for the Dead, here.)

I also remember, during one of those coffeehouses, when a tiny young woman performed Joni Mitchel's "The Circle Game." It was the first time I heard that song; I'll never know her name, but she was amazing. I just remember being there, in those days before Flip Cameras and cel Phones and small digital voice recorders and thinking "this is a moment that isn't being recorded; this is now, and then it will be gone, and I will always remember this."

There were a lot of songs and albums that I heard for the first time in that dorm, and even now, I'll always associate them with that place: "Don't Let's Start," by They Might Be Giants; "Pale Blue Eyes," by The Velvet Underground; "Hot Rats" by Frank Zappa; Brian Eno's ambient music, "Thursday Afternoon" in particular; "Paul's Boutique," by The Beastie Boys; "Solitude Standing," by Suzanne Vega; "If I Should Fall From Grace With God," by The Pogues; "Blue" and "Ladies of the Canyon" by Joni Mitchell; "Surfer Rosa" by The Pixies; "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart," by Camper Van Beethoven; "Too Long in the Wasteland" by James McMurtry; "Only Life" by The Feelies. I am sure that after I post this, I will think of many more.

A few years after I graduated UMASS, the dorm changed, becoming, unfortunately, a place known more for wild parties, heavy drug use and vandalism than for the sense of community I felt when I lived there. The gory details about this sad decline are easy to find on the Web if you look for them, but I prefer not including much about it here. I have fond memories of Butterfield, and would prefer to focus on the positive.

Because it is, in fact, these incredibly warm memories that, paradoxically, pose a danger. Baldly stated, if your past was miserable, it's easier to get out of the habit of dwelling on it. If you have good memories, though, it is far too easy to live in those memories, particularly when the present is a difficult and rocky place.

For the longest time, I lived in the past. I would take the lessons that I had learned from the present, and, in a chilling sort of magical thinking, spend far too much time going over that past so that I could work out exactly the way I would have liked it to be. Yes, I would say to myself, my college years (and my Butterfield years) were great, but now, knowing what I know, I could have made them even better.

It's a scary, slippery slope, and it's far easier to slide down when you have no children. I'll say this for kids: they keep you focused on what's happening right now. If you don't have kids, the next best thing is to work in a school, where pop culture references date faster than sour cream on a hot day. It keeps you in the present, because you must be there if you are to be an effective teacher (or, in my case, librarian).

Yet even if you're surrounded by kids at home and/or in the classroom (or the school library), that temptation to immerse one's self in the past is stong. And perhaps I'm not entirely right when I say that kids keep us in the present. Sometimes, when they're driving us crazy, it is far too easy to fill a mind with thoughts of coffeehouses, late night conversations about the meaning of life, marathon games of pool, and a dorm with a basement that was open for breakfast at 7 every weekday morning, and 9:30 every weekend.

And that's why I'm grateful to Tom's daughter for her success, and grateful to Tom for posting that photo from Rolling Stone. I think we all need to have our contemporaries say of their children: here they are at the age we were. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not our past. We only have the present to find something as meaningful now as certain things were back then.

And so, as I think fondly of the Butterfield I knew, I also face the fact that my contemporaries have sons and daughters who will grace the pages of Rolling Stone. They will also write novels, make movies, play instruments, participate in sporting events, act on the stage, act in movies, appear on television, teach children, hold political office, build houses, do people's taxes, build computers, fix computers, develop the next big advance in computers, and, in addition to all these things and countless others, have children of their own.

Before having those children, though, they will have experiences during their late teens and early twenties that are, for them, what Butterfield was for me and many others. Finally, when they have children of their own, and those children are in their twenties, this next generation of parents will look back on their own twenties I hope, with the same fondness I look back on my years in Butterfield.

I wish them well.