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5 Homecoming
- Wayne State University Press
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83 1 The convocation that opens each academic year at Kalamazoo College invariably takes place under the same perfect sky: brilliant blue, lit by sharp mid-September sunlight. It’s like a natural law, ridiculously predictable in a place like Michigan, a peninsula where the proximity of vast bodies of water usually spells tumultuous weather. Opening Day 1999 was no exception. I was in my second-row seat on the north side of the quad, sweltering in my polyester academic robe. My foremost thought was about meeting my first-year seminar students and their parents after the ceremony ended. I was starting my twenty-second year at K. I was the senior member of my department (by several lengths). I was also entering my twentieth—and, as it turned out, my final— year coordinating the women’s studies program, which I had helped to launch as a young upstart in 1980. I was the faculty advisor to the student-operated Women’s Resource Center, and I was organizing a new committee to support teaching excellence. It would be a busy year. But the first priority was to pull myself into this moment and look into the eyes of the terrified eighteen-year-olds whose roads had converged with my own. 5 HOMECOMING CHAPTER 5 84 We entered that fall term already diminished, as the first issue of that year’s campus Index demonstrates. It mentioned the death of Charles Tully, a sophomore, a gifted theater design student, who succumbed in July to the leukemia he had battled for most of his life. It announced a memorial service for Jessica Lowery, a senior, who had died in August in a car accident. But its lead story featured the stunning death of Ben Davies, a thirty-two-year-old physics professor who collapsed on the tennis court at noon on September 27, with classes barely underway. The doctors said his heart had probably stopped by the time he hit the clay. Some of us noted that, over the years, when the dark angel swept down over the college, it usually took more than one. Martha and Rick Omilian sent Maggie back down the road to Kalamazoo with satisfied minds. She seemed, they thought, much more at peace than she had been during her first year. Personally, philosophically, academically she had turned a corner. She told them she planned to join the Campus Democrats, completing the left turn she had gradually made the preceding year. She had decided to jump the premed track and now spoke of law school as her academic goal. As her relationship with Neenef disintegrated over the summer, Martha and Rick said to each other, “Well, that was a learning phase; we’re not going to get involved; she’s grown up.” Martha elaborates: “We didn’t want to interfere too much, because she figured it out.” That year’s golf team, in those days before the other students returned , cohered even more quickly than its previous incarnation. It had gained a member in Emily Ford, a new transfer student. On Emily’s first day on campus, she was carrying her golf bag up the sidewalk on Academy Street and looked up to see Maggie flashing “one of her smirks,” lugging her own bag downhill. Emily asked how she liked the team, and Maggie responded enthusiastically and reassuringly. “I felt very at ease my first day on campus and each day following because of her.” The Omilians remember Maggie taking a new, more relaxed attitude toward golf back to campus with her, as if she was no longer in it to please anyone but herself. In fact, Emily remembers a bad shot upsetting her and Maggie telling her, “Emily, just have fun; it’s only golf practice.” Teammate Sara Church remembers a match later on that fall in which [3.215.183.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:22 GMT) HOMECOMING 85 Maggie had “a frankly crappy round, including several shots straight into the same water hazard,” but Maggie “was laughing about it the whole way home.” From that day came a team slogan: “Twenty shots in the water and still smiling!” Maggie was golden, striding into her second year of college at once energized and relaxed. Katherine Chamberlain, a friend of Kelly Schulte ’s who had moved into Maggie’s circle at the end of the previous spring, remembers Maggie having “an incredible ease about her. Everything appeared to come really easily to her.” Before Neenef flew...