I had “Dead Flowers” by The Rolling Stones playing on iTunes last night as I sat down to write this piece. I had no idea of what I would write about but it got me thinking about flowers — specifically May flowers brought on perhaps by April showers — winter moving into spring and spring moving into summer.
I love the changing seasons and to me the change of the seasons are a big deal — maybe not a big deal as Joe Biden would describe a big deal — but important enough.
Around campus we are starting to see the daffodils pop up. Over at the Arboretum the floral gardens are coming back — a tradition that dates back years. No one does flowers better than Penn State — I know from personal experience.
The statute of limitations is up, so I can admit that I cut some roses out of the flower gardens for a date in college. (In my defense it was about 11:00 at night and back then we didn’t have a 24-hour supermarket that sold flowers. What was I supposed to do?) I guess I should also admit that in high school I picked a good number of daffodils from West Halls on my way to meet up with a girl I was pursuing.
With the “Lloyd Christmas/Bowl Haircut” I was sporting back in high school, I needed all the help I could get. If you saw a picture of my ‘do, you’d know that there wasn’t a jury in this country that would’ve convicted me for trying to cover up my complete lack of game and style with stolen flowers.
Now that I’ve confessed I will go do my penance. Five Hail Marys and an Our Father ought to cover it (the Catholics among you will know what I am talking about).
Living in State College is an experience that keeps us young at heart. State College is what Ponce de Leon was looking for when he searched for the fountain of youth. He should have passed Saint Augustine and kept heading North.
If you want to feel young and defy the aging process, this is the place to do it.
Every year the bulk of the population of this town — somewhere north of 40,000 people — is always between the ages of 18 and 23. Don’t believe me? Just look at the statistics.
When the students are in town there is always a lively vibe. Just walk downtown on a warm spring evening and try to tell me differently. This time of year there is a new energy in the air.
The only people getting older are the faculty and staff and the people who live here permanently. But the students we teach or mentor or live among remain the same age. That daily contact with college students keeps us plugged into a vein of energy that infects everyone who contacts it. (It also provides us with access to people who can explain how an Xbox, iPod or Skype works).
The people in this town feed off that energy, and it pulses through the heart of the community. Once spring fades into summer the town gets quiet, the pace slows. With the majority of the students gone, you realize how much vitality the students fed into all of us during the school year.
Once we reach April, the semester and the school year quickly race to a conclusion. Each year I hear at least a couple of seniors make the same statement “I can’t wait to get out of here.”
I always answer them by saying “Yes, you can wait.”
But inevitably time passes, the graduates move on and they are replaced by a new group of seniors who were born a year later.
As the school year comes to a close and graduation nears, I am reminded of the words that 1951 Penn State graduate and Random House Senior Vice President Sam Vaughan wrote in the Penn Stater in 1975:
“For you were there when the place was young — or younger — and so were you. That’s part of the dream-like quality. It’s always young at Penn State. You feel a bit of it in your blood, in the sniff of the earth, of electrical dynamos and pungent chem labs and dairy barns and in the brief and tantalizing scent of perfume passing…Yes, there is a niceness about the place, this place favored above many other, in a bowl of mountains, under a sky and an occasional freshening wind, a place that everyone is glad to get to, glad to get away from, and can never leave entirely or recapture.”
As winter moves to spring and the school year begins to wane, it is truly time to stop and contemplate how we have been so fortunate to have found the fountain of youth here in Happy Valley.
Just be sure to stop every once in a while and smell — but don’t steal — the flowers.
