This day started as good as any day can… which is to say that I made reservations for our family to spend a weekend at my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  It is something we’ve done annually for a few years now, I’ve made some trips separately myself, and the simple reality of knowing it is coming is enough to make me feel incredibly excited.

I don’t know exactly why it is, but the minute I get off the highway, and start the drive down Neil Street and into campus, it’s like I’m in a completely different place mentally and the rest of the world is a million miles away.  The feeling of driving up to the Illini Union, walking out onto the Quad, seeing Foellinger, walking down to Memorial Stadium, seeing Assembly Hall (sorry State Farm), IMPE (ah-hem… the ARC these days) … it’s like time hasn’t passed and suddenly everything is right and at peace.  The air feels different and I can breathe.  There is no place like it on Earth to me, and I’m so glad to have it.

It’s an interesting experience to “go home” now.  It’s been twenty-five years since I graduated.  So much is different, but it feels the same.  Walking from one end of campus to the other, I’m reminded of so many experiences of being a student, while confronted with the inevitable change that is part of an ever-evolving landscape down there.  I remember performing with small groups and the jazz bands at the Nature’s Table and how we’d have to jam the big bands in there (to the point you’d have to climb over everyone to get back to the drums).  The Table was gone before we graduated, unfortunately, but the memories are still there… as they are for playing Treno’s which has been replaced by another restaurant off Goodwin, or the ice cream at Delights around the corner from there… my god… incredible.  Or the cookies from the Mrs Fields next to Kams off Sixth and Daniel… I don’t remember what they cost, it wasn’t cheap, but they were insanely good.  And there was Papa Dels off Green (not the main one down Green near Third), the one across from the EE building… pizza by the delicious slice for what seemed like a dollar.  I was never a “Garcia’s” guy, but even that is gone… I think replaced by a frozen yogurt place or something.   Of course, there is La Bamba and super burritos bigger than your head, but that’s a whole thing unto itself.  We were there nearly every Sunday, the one day of the week that the Newman Hall cafeteria wasn’t serving dinner… and that was just fine, especially when the “old man” was at the grill, smiling while he dumped so much salsa on your burrito that you knew your entire body would be on fire for the next 24 hours… so worth it.

The best thing I can say about the memories is how vivid and wonderful they are, so many years later.  The worst is probably how commercialized campus has become with chains of franchises like Potbelly’s, Noodles and Co, Jimmy John’s and so on.  They have the benefit of the familiar, but none of the character and personality of the little mom and pop places that used to make campus feel unique and different and special.  Maybe that shift is a good thing for the students today, because they’ve grown up with a world overloaded with homogenized ideas of everything being the same and they would feel more disoriented in a place where they can’t just expect consistency and a menu they know walking in the door… I personally feel they’re getting cheated out of what makes the experience different and those memories more special and unique to that time.  Maybe twenty-five years from now, these students will look back and say “oh yeah, I remember that time at Jimmy Johns” and it will still be somehow unique, but I wonder if it will have the same kind of meaning as it does for people who went to Champaign and remember La Bamba when it was in Candlelight Court by comparison with when they moved to the location closer to the Quad… no way to know really.

Not all my memories are significant because they originated in good things.  I remember the discussion I had with my good friend Mike Uchic outside the Music Building the night I heard my father had his heart attack, trying to figure out whether I should go to our Jazz Band gig or try to find a way to get home that night.  Mike asked me what my dad would’ve wanted me to do, I immediately knew he’d want me to play the job, to which he said, “then play this one for him.”  I remember it as probably the best gig I played the entire three years I was in the Jazz Bands, because of how much emotion came through in the performance.  In the morning and couple days after, I was further amazed by the support of both my friends and professors, who literally bent over backwards to make it possible for me to take the train back to Chicago, spend a couple days with him at the hospital, and get back to campus without missing a beat.  In case of my Physics class, the professor literally set up equipment in a lab and went to Loomis with me so I could perform an experiment I would have otherwise missed so I wouldn’t have to take a hit on my grade.  The University of Illinois is a big campus, but it felt very small and personal when I needed it to be, and I would never have expected that going in.

Coming back to Champaign, ultimately what made the time special, I suppose, wasn’t the locations so much as the people I met and the time we spent there… playing basketball, making music, going out, being stupid, and all the other things that make college life more than just the time you spend in a classroom, doing homework, and jamming through your finals.  The educational stuff was part of where I learned a ton and created many memories, for sure, but it was all the things about dorm life, music, recreation, and the people I met that made my experience in college so incredible.  As a pretty introverted person, I suppose the two things I’m the most grateful for are, first, that I pushed myself so far outside my comfort zone to reach out, meet a lot of new people, and by extension, make an amazing group of friends.  Beyond that, it was the tremendous luck that I had in where I lived in Newman Hall my first few years, the guys who happened to be situated on my wing and my floor, and the happenstance that it created in getting me involved with people who made the experience fun and wonderful and connected… starting with a lot of basketball at IMPE (sorry kids… the ARC), to late night games of Euchre (including the 2- and 3-man versions we would play as needed), to the times we ordered the Late Night Special from Pizza World… something like two 14-inch, two topping pizzas with four cokes for like $8 (as I recall).  Ridiculous…

As I said, a lot has changed.  Newman Hall itself has been massively renovated and is something like triple the size it used to be, but that main entrance and the old mail slots are still there… and those steps up from the front desk are just as uneven as they were over twenty years ago.  As luck would have it, in one of my first trips down to campus after a long hiatus, someone happened to be coming out of the building as I was walking by, I told him I used to live there (and pointed to my Sophomore triple that overlooked Armory), and he very graciously opened up the door, showed me around briefly, and let me explore the new building even though things were largely shut down for the summer…

Walking through the music buildings, the rooms where we had jazz band rehearsals in Smith and the Music building are still the same as they were then, as is the band room at the Harding Band building… and I still remember my freshman band audition, walking into that room for the first time, with all the percussion equipment on the floor in the front of the room, with fourteen directors and grad students sitting the audience seats, waiting for me to play the prepared and sight reading materials… holy crap in hindsight… but somehow I got through it and didn’t screw it up.  Thank goodness, because it led me to a year with the First Concert Band under the direction of Jim Hile, who ultimately became the head Director of Bands at the University of North Carolina the next year… something that made all the sense in the world, given how incredible a director he was.

Part of what I’ve come to appreciate since leaving Champaign is the larger community and family that I joined by simply being there… and that’s been a wonderful part of the experience as well.  While it can come down to a simple “ILL-” or “Go Illini” that someone says to me every once in a while on the walking path or the immediate sense of connection you feel with either current students or other alumni; it’s a wonderful feeling.  One story that I’ve told a few times as one of the stranger things to happen was about four years after I graduated and was doing consulting work at Kemper Insurance.  One day in the cafeteria, a guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me, but did you go to the U of I?”  “Yes.” “Did you play a lot of pickup basketball while you were there?”… by that point, I recognized the guy as someone else who played a lot at IMPE as well, and it seemed very surreal that something so seemingly small in my college experience (albeit we played 5 times a week at some points) would be something I’d be ‘remembered’ for…  at that moment, it felt like the boundaries of campus extended WAY beyond anything I’d imagined they could, and in hindsight it was probably one of my first experiences of how connected the alumni community is after I had left.

In any case, I suppose I could continue to write all day about the memories I have, and perhaps I’ll write more on it another time, but I started today with one of the best feelings in the world.. the simple notion that I’m going to spend a few days at the place that was my home for four years, where I met some of the best people I’ve ever known, and made memories that I will have forever… not always because of the good things, but because of the people and places that were part of the experience.  I’ve asked different people over the years whether, if they had the opportunity, they would make the same choices in terms of where they went to college.  Not everyone comes back with a resounding yes depending on their experience, but in my case, I wouldn’t do it any different, including the dumb stuff and bad choices that are part of how you learn where your limits and so on are…

I’m looking forward to seeing you again, Champaign-Urbana… and revisiting all the memories you hold… while we make a few new ones with my girls, in the hopes they have the same kind of experience when they head to college soon, wherever they may choose to go.

-CJG 06/10/2017 (BS, Computer Science – College of Engineering 1992)