Sam Lazarus

Three years later, I still find myself feeling a little ridiculous.  My mind blamed my gut, the same gut that as a first-year responded do the loud yelling coming from the halls of Battell that had kept me from getting into bed. 

The source of the noise was a member of my first-year seminar, but no more than an acquaintance.  She was sporting a bright pink bikini, a ski helmet, goggles and the furriest boots I had seen since arriving at Midd as a first-year not more than two months before.  It had already been a non-descript week night, the kind where Chinese homework, 5:00 dinner and astronomy lab all mesh together to form one long block of time capable of sufficiently making me exhausted to the point where it was not hard to want to pass out for a good week.  So yes, it was my gut and not my common sense that responded to the voice instead of tuning it out.

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I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t provide yet another account (although albeit more fair and balanced than many you may see) about the Quidditch phenomenon here at Midd.  I’d like to at least pretend that my perspective is different from most!

In the fall of 2006, my first year at Middlebury, a group of us got together on Sunday mornings to combat the ill-effects of a Saturday night by putting on rather haughty clothing and our best British accents as we competed in a rousing round of croquet.  Soon we began to brainstorm about other ways to ensure that we could drag ourselves out of bed before 11:00 and before long, under the leadership of Xander Manshel, we found ourselves with capes on our backs, brooms between our legs and running around Battell Beach chasing our hallmate cross country runner/wrestler Rainey Johnson dressed in yellow. 

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Somewhere in the mountains of Tibet I forgot how fast life can be.  It was either the macaque monkeys making valiant attempts at capturing my lunch or the ethereal mist that hung over the monasteries dotting the cliffs, but perhaps both were instrumental in helping me lose my complete sense of time. I remember thinking then that despite what appeared to be my total departure from life at home, in a few short months I would be back in Middlebury surrounded by those who also had made the seemingly impossible journey from the ends of the earth back to the figurative center of it all. I remember that while excited for whatever lay ahead I also dreaded again facing the very things that had originally driven me away to a land of monkeys and mountains. And yet it felt like merely a short breath had gone by when I found myself back at Middlebury. Having lost my sense of time long before my return, it was pretty easy to feel lost.

For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).

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The greatest challenge of a student representative of the College to Middlebury’s alumni is to capture in writing what makes Middlebury such a special place, finding the right words to evoke simultaneously both the alumni’s memories of the past and a current student’s impressions of the present. Although our Middlebury experiences are separated in time and, especially because Midd alumni are spread all over the globe, our day-to-day lives are now separated by great space, the common Middlebury experiences we all share are no less substantial. Middlebury enjoys change, in its students, teachers, and building, but the longer that I am here, the more I appreciate that there is nonetheless a constant to Middlebury that is truly special.

That I even think of myself right now “here” at Middlebury underscores how Middlebury is more than just a beautiful campus and cozy dorm room looking out at the Green Mountains in Vermont or even a discrete time period of a time. At this moment, I am in Hangzhou, China, spending my winter and spring terms at the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in China. Though thousands of miles from Middlebury, Vermont, I feel no less a part of the Middlebury campus, and no less close to my friends spread over the globe, much the same way Midd alums are. No doubt being away from Vermont makes me especially appreciative of how for alumni the Middlebury experience can stay with you long after graduation.

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