nostalgic na agad

I’ve seen that banner above the Alumni Hall for five years now, the one that greets Sillimanians from all over the country and the world when they go back every August, the one that says “Welcome home.”

It is an interesting choice of the last word. I would think that school and home are two different arenas we center our youthful days on, but in Silliman University, it is one and the same.

Those who pass by that banner, as they walk towards the cafeteria while stepping on a few dead acacia leaves and listening to the beeps of motorcycles, could imagine a 1968 accountancy graduate with a smile this big stepping on the pier with an excited grandkid in tow. That alumnus could have come from Canada, and worked as a corporate attorney, and hasn’t been back to the Philippines in twenty years. Now that he has come back to retire for good, he does not visit his hometown in Davao first. He purposefully scheduled his Philippine Airlines flight in August to celebrate his alma mater’s birthday in Dumaguete.

Then they imagine that that fictional Canadian lawyer is not the only one in that pier with a smile on his face.

What can be said of this phenomenon that entices thousands of alumni to return to Silliman again and again? If not physically, at least in their thoughts?

I believe it starts the moment Physical Education teachers force freshmen to memorize the Silliman song by making them sing it, no matter how pitiful the voice, in front of the whole class.

Then, it gets reinforced when students decide to join a fraternity, sorority, organization, or fellowship, and when they share exam woes and teacher rants, classroom humiliations and competition victories, and drunken nights and love highs by the amphitheater, library, classrooms, ad infinitum.

Finally, there’s the graduation, the commencement of the supposed real life. They think Silliman ends the moment their names are called, preferably with a cum laude attached to it as a tribute to all those books they memorized, and they stand there basking on the Luce lobby’s lights.

In that slow minute, they walk across the stage thinking that they are as whole a person as they could have ever become. Because in those four years (or five years or six), they found out their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, limitations. They found themselves in Silliman, in the people they have met while in Silliman.

After that, they work and start families. They encounter more problems and more realities.

They go through to so-called life’s journey in search for something they thought they wanted.
But the quest for that elusive thing everyone wants never becomes easier, the journey never seems to stop, until they come back home to Silliman University every once in a while to recharge and rediscover themselves.

This coming August, I look forward to passing by that banner again.

*photos via p4ncreas.multiply.com