Ghost in a Landscape

In 1996, my colleague and friend Susan Dreyer Leon and I drove up to Syracuse University in order to visit our former student, Melissa Sanez before the start of her first semester there. The trip was exciting for me on numerous levels -- I hadn't been back since graduating ten years before, so just being in the presence of so many triggers of so many memories was a blast by itself. Then there was the fun of showing a good friend around the campus and environs, and sharing with her the many fond memories and stories it brought to mind.

The real rush of being back up there, though, was that it represented a major victory for Melissa. To appreciate the weight of her accomplishment, you have to differentiate her acceptance into S.U. from the experience of most of the other young people around her there. Like me, most werre white and came from a background of privilege. Melissa, on the other hand, is, as she puts it, "Fili-rican" -- half Filipina and half Puerto Rican. She grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, one of poorest and most dangerous of New York's neighborhoods at that time.

Melissa came to the school where Susan and I taught, Satellite Academy High School in Manhattan, after having tried Murry Bergtraum, a business-themed magnet. She didn't leave because she was a failure; instead, she needed a small school, where people could help her work through the myriad "issues" that faced her as a girl.

Without betraying confidentiality, suffice it to say, the circumstances of her home life made her acceptance to my alma mater a huge accomplishment. I'd written her a good recommendation letter, outlining the resilience and perseverance she embodies, along with her academic strengths, which were considerable. I can say, with good certainty, that if I had been confronted with half of the obstacles Melissa was forced to face as a child, I never would have made it into Syracuse.

We treated Melissa like we were her parents, taking her out for dinner, not allowing her to pay for anything, and having her tell us all about all of her summer classes, her friends and professors. Boys. It was a great time.

The one eerie moment came for me when I decided to go off on my own one afternoon to walk across the quadrangle that makes up the center of the campus. The last time I'd made this walk I was what's euphemistically known as a "fifth-year" senior, a Big Man on Campus who couldn't walk this walk without multiple students (and other various and sundry hangers-on) calling his name, tossing him a frisbee or inviting him to join them in some really fun, quasi-legal activity.

This time, though, I cross the quad, noting a few new buildings that weren't there ten years ago, and not one person waved or called my name. For a moment, I felt invisible, like a ghost in a landscape. Instead of allowing the self-pity to creep in, I smiled and kept going.

I think I smiled because the fact about colleges and universities is that they only really belong to you for that brief period during which they're the center of your life. It was time to pass that along to Melissa, and I was happy to do it.

Melissa graduated in 2000, ten years ago. I went back to watch her receive her degree, but didn't cross the quad this time.

And I haven't been back since.