The scariest ghost you can meet on Halloween is your very own. Princeton was full of those ghosts, for the past three days.
Blue-jean clad students strolling past the Woodrow Wilson School–do these kids still call it “God’s bicycle rack”?
That’s what Frank and I called it, back in our grad student days, as we hiked past the very same fountain and magnolia trees, maybe at midnight, off to get coffee before going back to the lab.
Or are these laughing students the doppelgangers of later students, pre-meds of the early seventies, who worked so hard in the bio labs I TAed that I got in trouble when their median grade came out a B+. (And one student who got a B+ was close to tears at that terrible grade.)
Students lugging big ludicrous backpacks could also, in another era, have been friends of my children, headed off to some ultimate Frisbee occasion.
Or maybe some of those kids we just met this spring, when Frank joined in a Princeton student Frist filibuster.
As I morph these lively present-day students back through my multiple memories of Princeton, I feel myself shifting and sliding around in so many different past tenses. Halloween black and orange will stand for Princeton, this year.
p.s. It was great to revisit so many real live friends in Princeton too. In fact, that was more like an early Christmas!
p.p.s. We’re spending tonight in Harrodsberg, Kentucky. The Shaker Village hotel has restful charms but most likely not wifi.