“SEE YOU NEXT FALL.” Yes, so the sign would say, but one year it would no longer apply to you. You weren’t coming back. Well, you’d had about enough of it anyway, you thought.

You’d exhausted the courses and maybe yourself. You’d been checking on employers, writing to graduate schools, taking the GREs. The end of your college years was there on the calendar. You were a lame duck.

And maybe that’s why it all felt so good! Why your heels kicked up a bit, why your walk had a little or a lot of that senior swagger. King of the hill! You’d done nearly all of your responsibilities. Just keep your grades up.

And even that was easier now. You knew all the ropes. You could take some time to look around, looking for snapshots for memory. Why, just as you were leaving, did everything become so dear?

Those campus trees, that course you’d always wanted to take, that one last college football game, that girl who smiled, one more song from the jukebox, that last dance, faces of college friends not to be seen again, the professor you dismissed too soon, chapel bells, Myers in the fog, smells of musty books and perfume and dinner, fall leaves and winter snows, saying goodnight.

Last lingering looks to memorize what you would forget. “Pomp and Circumstance.” You’ve heard it before as others have graduated. But now in the distance the march begins for you. You notice for the first time how both confident and sad it sounds. It fits the day. It moves you along but lets you think back.

Down to the Hollow. Past Reci. Past NICHTS DER RUHM. There’s the Kissing Bridge you never used and maybe no one did. There are the waiting diplomas, folders of leather. One is for you. Your ticket to somewhere.

There is the faculty, weighty with dignity in fine robes. There’s Prexy Stoughton. Names are called. Yours. Mine! President Stoughton pauses to say something as he hands me my diploma. Perhaps he recounts some bit of personal history. Is he telling all about my messy room? I can’t remember. Dean Stauffer’s face gives something away. No, of course I hadn’t accomplished as much as I might have.

There’s the crowd of us, relieved and happy. There, behind us, are the opportunity-givers, whose hopes and expectations we almost certainly treated more callously than we should have. But isn’t that just the way? A bright day: a perfect Wittenberg, wide-open future.

And there is Itsuo and me. He would go to Paris, I to Baltimore, and that would be that. And there I am with part of my family. My aunt Verna is on the left, a Wittenberg graduate herself, daughter of Henry Arnold, the former psychology professor and director of adult studies.

My brother Philip is on the right. And the older woman? Meet my grandmother Hannah, wife of Henry, mother of my father Harold. She is a Wittenberg graduate, too. Class of 1931, the same year as her son.

He started college, and she followed. “Piffle! I can do that!” That was how she announced her intentions. She may have started behind, but she got her diploma one alphabetical step ahead of her son (Hannah versus Harold), and with her berobed husband and all of his professorial -looking colleagues looking, turned theatrically to her son and stuck out her tongue.

And the old gentleman nearly out of the picture on the left? That’s my grandfather, Loyal Herbert Larimer, dean emeritus of Hamma Divinity School and my mother’s father. He, too, was a Wittenberg graduate — Class of 1894 followed by a master’s degree three years later. It was that family visit with him in 1945 that let me see Wittenberg for the first time.

So, we graduate, and the little society that was the Class of 1959, no different than any other, disperses into the world. We make our way, do the things we do, and then one day we wander back. There have been changes at Wittenberg but not big ones.

Things are comfortably familiar. Myers is still there, and the trees. And there is no sign of age in our shadow.

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