In an effort to separate out what exactly I am mourning the loss of this second semester of my senior year, I hesitate to say it's a place to party. Not even the first month back and I'm sure many seniors, not to mention underclassmen, would agree that Bowdoin is missing a certain sense of spirit. In college, where the academic arena confronts us with the biggest challenges, you expect the social playing field to be a little less daunting. In this case, our field has been bulldozed.
Maybe following in the almost symbolic annihilation of the old soccer and lacrosse field beside Harpswell apartments, a sense of the old Bowdoin is gone with it. Not only will there no longer be lacrosse games out in front of the Harpswell apartments this spring, but the walk to celebrate a victory just got a little farther, too. Maybe it's the last year that 83 and a half Harspswell Road will be a part of Bowdoin at all. At least for this group of seniors, it's hard to imagine that familiar landmark vacant or, worse, torn down.
Still, I want to stress that it's more than that?a kind of a strange ending for the senior class. The other weekend, with the death sentences of a couple of our trusted hangout spots, I looked around my apartment at max capacity and couldn't help but feel like I was reliving freshman year. Isn't part of senior privilege the actual ownership of the party house?
The idea that now it's your turn and your friends are hosting?are old enough to host?goes hand in hand with a certain sense of senior identity. The expectation was never an Animal House-esque rager, but there was surely a belief that our latter half of college would offer more social freedoms.
There seems a kind of inherent design in the college's social system that designates the senior as a kind of a misfit. Coming into the fall, I think we liked that idea?the notion that we are a little more on our own, that we figure out where and with whom we want to hang out. Less like the freshman dorm scene where too many of your screaming peers can send you into meltdown mode midweek, we're in control of the destination, the journey?supposedly the whole thing, if within reason.
I suggest, though, that we are within reason, never really pushing the envelope; I think we're just in search of a good time and a little camaraderie. Sure, there's nothing wrong with a college house party, but remember that a night at Quinby is unlikely to draw as many of your peers as it is a full blown menagerie of the freshman faces from your sub-100-level bio class and their many friends. However, if you're out with high hopes to find your freshman cutie?by all means make your way to the dance floor.
But for the rest of this group, for instance, the group now spending their senior spring under the watchful eye of Security (which now has its house guests limited to a girlfriend-only policy), I can only suggest that this might all just be about getting us ready to leave. Perhaps we will be ready to head out together as the last group to go through Bowdoin with a number of shared experiences that can never be recreated.
We might be one of the last classes to graduate with memories of the old Harpswell field being only a couple of quick strides from a good place to kick off the lobster bake, pregame a Saturday soccer game, and have a very merry crack-mas.