There has been a lull because I have been in Wyoming since Thursday. I haven't been near a computer since then, but I have some material coming up soon. Let's just say it was an amazing long weekend in Wyoming. I decided this must be better coming in parts. Here is Thursday.
Driving into your college town after you graduated college is always a weird feeling. I did it again on Thursday because I was coming into town for Kate’s graduation. I feel eerily disconnected from a town and a people I was once a part of. I am never quite sure how I am going to be received. It’s almost as if I am in a different country when I go back. After all, it is Wyoming. But it all comes back within a few hours: the people, the attitude, the atmosphere, and the lingering friends hanging onto the threads of a college life.
Kate spent time with her pharmacy friends Thursday night. It was a girl’s night, so I decided to make it a guy’s night. Actually, I had no other choice. It was either call some friends that are still in school, or go back to the old apartment, where I was staying that night, and crash on a twin bed that was not that stable due to a lot of unsleeping. I rang a friend who used to swim and caught up with the Laramie crew at their new house. Three of the guys from this house were graduating on Saturday, all with degrees in mechanical engineering. Their unlocked bikes rested on the side of the house. The windows were open. The door was unlocked. There was a keg in the driveway and a beer pong table set up in the garage.
College was for me the first time that I had a lot of friends that I don’t have much in common with. For instance, these friends were my friends because I swam with them. We didn’t meet at FCA, church, work, or anywhere else. We met in the weight room. We sweat into Corbett pool together during lactate sets. We met in our suffering and it didn’t matter to us if that is all we had in common. What we had in common was often all that mattered and in that most indescribable way, and yet in one of the most touching ways, we share this bond that can instantly be reignited by one another’s quick entrance into our lives again. So it was on Thursday night when I joined up with four old teammates for a trip to the bars. It was the good ole’ bachelor days of college again, at least my version of them, and it was a grand time. We caught up, befriended strangers, and threw some back at 3rd Street, Lovejoy’s, and The Buckhorn. When it was time to go home the five of us and a few others got a ride in the back of a pickup truck back home. I still had farther to go, so I hopped on a bike and rode my way back to Palmer Drive #106. The time was 2:40am when I went to sleep, 21 hours after I woke up for work that morning.
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