This Just In – time waits for no one.
The students will be back soon, and I swear, this time they’re going to be in diapers. They get younger every year.
I arrived in Chapel Hill at the end of September of 1978. It was after the arrival of that year’s students, but I fit right in with them as I was 20 years and one month old. When I met people and told them I had just come to town, they asked again and again if I had come here to go to school. No, no, I said. I was here because my husband’s job at Blue Cross had brought us here. Perhaps I should have said “Not yet.”
Fifteen years and two kids later, I was lucky enough to find myself in the School of Journalism at UNC, drinking in everything I could from UNC legends Chuck Stone and Jim Shumaker. In my 30’s, my perspective on being in school was a little different from my classmates. I think it’s fair to observe that paying your own tuition tends to discourage a person from flirting with the waste of a failed class. I had my shoulder to the wheel for three years (including summers). This was my full-time job.
Attending college while caring for aging parents (my in-laws) also meant that margins for wasting time were near zero. It was classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, family obligations (doctor’s appointments, errands, kids’ school stuff) were on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Weekends were wall-to-wall study time.
In the midst of all this, I was at Eastgate, coming out of Bruegger’s with my coffee and bagel. A bewildered incoming student (perhaps an incoming classmate at the time) came up to me and asked for directions to a dorm on campus. It was move-in weekend.
I walked the kid back to her parents’ car and found two people who looked at lot like me. They looked tired and flustered. There was no nav system in the car or Siri to aid with directions in those days. Rand McNally was still a thing. I sent Mom and Dad in the right direction and welcomed them to Chapel Hill. I told them I was a student, too.
It was the “Thank you ma’am” that set me back on my (tar) heels. Had I not explained that I was a student? Was it not clear that this entitled me to “forever young” status? Had I not disguised the fact that I thought their daughter looked too young to go to college? What was happening?!
It was just what happens when the students come in every year. The restaurants are busy. Franklin Street is buzzing. There are people on foot and bicycles absolutely everywhere. Some of them are wandering around looking awestruck and lost and wanting to know the quickest way to get to the Smith Center or where the best pizza could be found (Peppers – no contest).
It’s a genuinely beautiful thing to see … again and again. There are finding their way around our town for the first time and the experience of that discovery is going to be their unforgettable memory of a rite of passage.
They bring with them an unmistakable and irreplaceable energy that makes Chapel Hill what it is – a college town. Now and always.
So before they arrive, eat dinner on Franklin Street and enjoy the quiet dog days of August (and the available parking). The joyful noise will soon be here.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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