homecoming...

This week has been Vanguard's homecoming; themed "The Great Adventure." It has been full of alumni-related chapels, meetings, events and parties; none of which I have attended. No, my time comes Saturday, which will be nonstop as soon as I open my eyes. I get to play in the Alumni vs. Faculty/Staff softball game in the morning, then I have a R.A. reunion to go to in the afternoon, a young alumni dinner in the late afternoon, and then watch the women's and men's basketball teams whoop up on their opponents.

It is weird for me, as an alumni, to go back to Vanguard. In a way I feel as if I am out of place, or even treading on people's toes ever so slightly at times. Yet there are the few there that I enjoy seeing time and time again, and for them, it is worth it. I suppose I might make a comment on the whole "homecoming" aspect of it all, but for that I can only quote from one of my favorite movies, Patch Adams, from the beginning scene:

• All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers. All of us. All the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find a way home. It's hard to describe what I felt like then. Picture yourself walking for days in a driving snow. You don't even know you're walking in circles. The heaviness of your legs and the drifts, your shouts disappearing into the wind. How small you can feel, and how far away home can be. Home, the dictionary defines it as both a place of origin, and a goal or destination. And the storm? The storm was all in my mind. Or as the poet Dante put it: in the middle of the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path. Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place...

And for me, I suppose all of life truly is a coming home, no matter where I find myself. I graduated in May to find myself coming home to my family, and yet now I am going back again to my other family that I spent the last four years with. It is something to think about, to say the least.