Three days before I started my final semester of college, I gave a tour of the place I will soon leave behind.
I was showing it off to my uncle, Steve, and 15-year-old cousin, Alex, who were visiting from Chicago. It was the first time my family had visited since my freshman year. The next time will be when they see me walk through the Columns for the final time.
We started at the place that everyone knows. From the center of the Columns, I could spin in a circle and not see another person on the Francis Quadrangle. For this brief spill of time, the Quad was ours.
We ran this campus that day. We watched Missouri beat Alabama in men’s basketball. We walked the perimeter of Stankowski Field. We fell silent when we crossed under the bell tower of Memorial Union.
That day was a trip through a place they could never understand. Here’s Cornell Hall. Here’s Ellis Library. Here’s a building where, over four years, I have never spent a moment.
Here’s me filling with regret.
We toured the MU Student Recreation Complex, and that took a while. It feels so everyday to me now. But it was something different to watch Alex, a starting point guard on his basketball team, stare endlessly at the pickup games dominating the four courts. I could feel the wheels turning in his head, playing out game scenarios and weaving them into a routine of life. I could feel them because there was a time when I, too, stood there staring into the dawn of endless excitement.
We walked to the front of the Quad, where we could read the “University of Missouri” inscription written into stone and see the Columns as the backdrop. I could feel the thousands of photographers who came before us, snapping away the same image that means something similar, yet something different, to all of us.
I posed to the right of the stone nameplate. Alex stood to the left. Steve, with a camera in hand, clicked once. Three photos were taken.
The first was the one Steve and Alex saw, a postcard with giant statues in the distance and the gothic Jesse Hall even farther away.
The second was the one I saw, with the Columns I walk by every day and the building that holds my financial and academic fate behind them.
And then there’s the photo that I see now. It is a monumental landmark that is also everyday life. It is the view I had when I arrived here and the one I see as I prepare to leave, crammed into a single frame.
It is the view I see each time I look at the photo now framed on my desk.
Sometimes the only way to take measure of your life is to watch someone watch you. Meet at a universally identifiable image such as the Columns and you’ll see three frames of view emerge: the feeling it evokes in each of you and the shared image of what it can mean for everyone.
As my relatives followed me through my college campus that Saturday, our conversation divided into these three frames. My visitors didn’t know the back stories of the auditoriums that held the most painful classes, the hallways that were always the most crowded or how the dungeon in Jesse Hall was a battlefield for holds on my account for the last three years.
They saw it all at face value: a beautiful campus that can produce a college degree. They saw what brought me here four years ago, and what will have me coming back as an alum for years to come.
I’m going to look at that photo more times than I can count this semester. Maybe, then, I can make up for all the days I spent focused so much on the small picture of college that I missed the big picture of life.