The fourth annual Hyde Park day was an abject failure in terms of my overachiever's schedule (act surprised), but nevertheless one of the best days I've had in a long time.
Since my husband had to take the puppy to obedience class in the car, I made my way to the University of Chicago via public transportation, which took about 90 minutes from my home in Rogers Park. Unfortunately, I had only budgeted slightly more than an hour for the trip, so I missed the presentation on the Mansueto Library, which I had been really excited about; future-of-the-book stuff is right up my alley. On the bright side, it was a ridiculously gorgeous day, so I found myself a bench outside and read until it was time for the 1:30 tour of the new library.
A little background on me: I am 36 years old and reasonably well-adjusted, yet still enormously and (needless to say) irrationally bitter that my undergrad experiences failed to live up to the promise of the movies. Once, a friend and I were watching a film set at a small, New England liberal arts college but filmed at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. The friend, who had gone to a small, New England liberal arts college, looked at a breathtaking shot of an old building covered in multicolored ivy, and sighed, "I wish I'd gone to a school that looked like that."
"You did!" I yelled. "Whereas I actually went to that school, and it looks nothing like that in real life!"
I mean, of course parts of it, in isolation, look exactly like that, which is why so many movies are filmed on that campus every year. But mostly, it is sprawling and urban and tragically bereft of thoughtful, ruddy-cheeked young men in fisherman sweaters, who spend their days riding bicycles around duck-dotted ponds, occasionally stopping to rest under explosively colored old maples, where they all have the same daydream: about a shy, chubby girl with a kind heart and a terrible attitude showing up with a thermos of hot chocolate. Spiked with whiskey.
I enjoy real life quite a bit, most of the time, but I was deeply, deeply disappointed by it in my college years, is what I'm saying. So these last two gorgeous autumn Sundays, strolling through the Northwestern and University of Chicago campuses, I've been beset with that old, familiar, increasingly embarrassing longing for a do-over.
When the 1:30 tour of the Mansueto Library was too packed to accommodate me, I headed across the street to Mandel Hall to grab some lunch before the 2:30 tour. Looking for a place to park myself for a bit, I wandered into a dining room that could easily have been from a movie set: impossibly high ceilings, hand-carved woodwork, oil paintings of old white men along the walls, that sort of thing. And I did something I almost never do, something I haven't done regularly since I was an undergrad in the early 1990s: I took out a notebook and started writing longhand.
Unfortunately (again), I didn't stop in time for the 2:30 tour, or the 3:30, or for the Amitav Ghosh interview at 4. (I saw my friend Jill on the way out of that, though, and she said it was wonderful.) I kept writing for hours, finishing up with just enough time to have a cup of tea in the courtyard before The Encyclopedia Show.
In other words, for one afternoon, at 36 years old, I essentially had the college experience I've always wanted. (Well, minus the guy in the fisherman sweater, but a big guy in a grey hoodie asking a tiny puppy for kisses is a pretty good alternative, and one of those was waiting for me at home.) I do feel bad about wasting the all-access pass for those few hours, but it was really rather glorious.
And then the Encyclopedia Show! So much fun! From Megan Mercier's piece about a suburban subdivision as literal uncanny valley to Jamila Wood's lovely poem about FRIEND, a robot built to assist people with disabilities, it was a fantastic evening. And for the rest of my life, I get to tell people I was once invited to speak on nanotechnology at the University of Chicago. Sort of.
Next up: Laurie Anderson! I will most definitely make sure I leave myself enough time to get to that. See you after the first full week of the festival.
Kate Harding
is the co-author of Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.
Tags: hyde park, ghosh, encyclopedia, campus, university of chicago, mansueto library, mandel hall
