Alumni Weekend at Oberlin College

It’s mildly hilarious that this got dubbed «Alumni Weekend”– I would say «Commencement» is clearly the main event. But Oberlin really does it hella-​cheap-​style by combining the two and turning Oberlin (the town) instantaneously into the craziest, most overstuffed sausage of a quiet Ohio town.
That said, I enjoyed Commencement/​Alumni Weekend FAR more as a student rather than a graduating student, when you can enjoy Illumination, BBQs, and other beginning-​of-​summer-​but-​still-​at-​school activities without the mental weight of knowing your parents (and step-​parents and grandparents ad nauseum) are either in tow or desperately seeking you out. I realized this when I found Illumination to be positively breathtaking when I first saw it (see Kevin S.‘s description) and just sort of a blur the next.
Side note: Nothing like watching Obies age. The ten-​year-​reunion dance at the ‘Sco, with its herd of 42-​year-​old aging hippies and nerds (at one point I had written «38-​year-​old”– bad math!) dancing spasmodically to the tunes of the early nineties both warmed my heart and put me on notice.

Hundreds of candle-​lit Chinese paper lanterns hang in the stately old trees in Tappan Square as the orchestra plays and all the people you slept with last semester are dragging their parents through the crowd, saying hello as they say goodbye. Illumination night, Alumni Weekend. If you’re a senior, it’s a sweet sayonara under the canopy of multicolored lights augmented by the first few fireflies of the Ohio summer. If you’re an underclassperson staying behind, it’s a chance to pre-​savor the bittersweet. If you’re an alum, it’s an awkward dance of avoidance and quest, finding the ones you miss and love, or missed loving, while avoiding the pretentious, the too painful to talk to, or the insufferable. If you’re on staff or a townie it’s an extra ritual to kick off your summer, a vivid resetting of the clock and a harbinger of quiet warm weeks without all those damn students. Winding the night on the steps of Finney to the tentative funkiness of the steel drum band will always be there in the back of your mind when you hear or say that word, Oberlin.