The other day, I was remembering my freshman year in college and a habit my girlfriends and I got into that year. We’d get out of our morning classes at 11:30, head to the cafeteria to grab lunch to go, and bring it back to our dorm room, where we’d settle in on the floor and watch The Maury Povich Show.
We were a classy bunch.
I think back to those days and I always seem to remember them as being sunny and warm and full of laughter. It’s easy to forget that surely there were also rainy days, ones where we were stressed from our last class, or fighting about some freshman-level conflict, or sweating that upcoming exam we knew we hadn’t studied enough for.
But that’s the thing about nostalgia. We remember the best parts, the easy parts, the wonderful parts. And with time, the rest falls away.
There was plenty about college that was hard – being away from home for the first time but not yet being fully independent, figuring out what you like and what is interesting but still having no idea what the future holds, being old enough to know better but young enough to still be learning the tough lesson. It would be a wild oversimplification to think of that era in these nostalgic terms.
But when I think back, I just remember those easy lunches together in front of our little TV watching our trashy daytime shows.
And maybe, just for a moment, that’s OK…
