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Friday visit to Toon Town....and my past.....
Further to my last "First" blog of 2008. I had to pick up an old loaner server from Kindersley Transport in Saskatoon last week. I was going to cancel the trip since Nathan was still at home from pre-school after his tonsilectomy, but I decided he was well enough to travel with me.
So, I loaded him up in the van and we headed up mid-morning. The server pickup at the customer only took about 10 minutes, and I wasn't just going to turn around and drive back to Regina. I had told Nathan if he was good on the drive up, we would stop by the university and see the dinosaurs they have on display at the Geology building. It was reading week at the university, so hardly anyone was around. Nathan liked the exhibit, but was hungry so we grabbed a quick bite at the A&W in Place Louis Riel, and then walked through the +15 tunnels over to the Agriculture building and then into my old stomping grounds, the engineering building.
This was a very surreal feeling for me, almost as if I had slipped into a time warp and gone back in time 18 years. Nothing has changed much at the university. All the same displays in the hallways in the Agriculture and engineering buildings (which were brand new in 1989 - my first year) were still on display! I retraced the walk through campus I had taken to class so many times over my four years of mechanical engineering study, and strangely I felt exactly as I did then.......except that now I was carrying my 4-year-old son on my back, and passing by students that looked MUCH too young to be going to university. In truth, this phase of my life was HALF my life ago! An eternity ago, and yet in some other ways, not so long ago.
I walked through the dark corridors of the engineering building, past some of the classrooms I had spent so much time in, noting again, nothing looking like it has changed one iota since 1993, other than, I suppose, much updated computer technology. The artwork, the displays, vending machines and even the tattered old furniture where we had all hung out between classes was still there. I wandered around for a while with scenes from those old days playing back whenever I peered into a lab or classroom where I could remember a specific event. Nathan started to get a little bored (could you blame him?) but then I found the graduating class photo from 1993 on one wall with all the engineering grads and pointed out to Nathan a younger looking man that he still recognized as his dad. I looked at all the other people that had been my closest friends at the time and realized that I have not kept in good touch with any of them.......not one! I never would have guessed it at the time that when I walked out of the last set of exams with those guys, it would be the last time I spoke to them. And now suddenly its 15 years later. I feel like I'm a totally different person.
It is truly one of the strangest feelings I have ever had, bringing Nathan with me that afternoon and exploring my past. It was as if he was an anchor to my new life while I sailed around in my old one for an hour or so. He seemed so small, distant, and almost like a bit of a stranger, but I realized it was because I was seeing him through the eyes of my old self, a young man who had no idea what it would be like to have a son he could show around his school one day. I just had to watch him laugh and run ahead of me in the sun on the path ways outside the building to be brought back to the present, one in which this place that had been all so familiar, was now the strange place.
The drive back home seemed to go faster than usual. I will look back on that day fondly for a long time. In another 15 years, Nathan will be old enough to attend university.......I wonder if he decides to go into engineering if they will have updated any of that old furniture and displays? |
Posted: 1:01 AM, March 2, 2008 |
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