I can remember the first time he taught me how to run a receiver's route. The out-of-bounds were marked with white birches and blue spruces. I lined up to his right, my six-year-old frame ending somewhere around his waist. Eyes focused, he slapped the ball and hopped backward. I sprinted forward, cut to my left and snapped my head over my shoulder, arms outstretched into the air.
Dr. Seuss once marveled at all the places we would go; in three days I will graduate from my father's university and I can't seem to measure how far I've come. Long before I toiled in Grainger High, I was a junior paleontologist, mining quartzite in my parents' backyard while hoping to unearth a Stegosaurus or some other Jurassic treasure.
It's probably a long way from dinosaurs to debt-equity ratios, but the truth is I've waited for graduation since arriving in Madison. My marriage to UW was one of convenience and cost-benefit, with a dowry financed with our family's tax dollars. So why, if all this has just been a means for an undisclosed end, am I now uneasy at the prospect of leaving?
My father lived a few doors down from State Street Brats, on a lot presently home to a parking garage, when he attended the University of Wisconsin. We get caught up over steak sandwiches whenever he visits. It's not that our relationship has changed since I moved away from home, but there is something different about his college stories. He still recalls his exploits with wistful contemplation, but now I receive them more as his peer and less as his little boy.
Back when they actually allowed basketball at the Red Gym, my dad and his friends would converge at the castle for pick-up games. Little did he know that more than 30 years later, Devin Harris, future NBA lottery pick, would dunk on his son at the South Eastern Recreational Facility. When I told my father, as one UW man to another, his voice swelled with pride over the phone, as if he just learned Jennifer Aniston was carrying his grandchild.
This campus is so special because we each donate our last, great transformations into adulthood. I feel I shared more insecurities and frustrations with Lake Mendota's piers than with my peers. Along with that quiet introspection, I'm going to miss those anonymous names and faces'classmates with diverging lives and intersecting perspectives'who will fade from my recollection.
That's why alumni still come back to Camp Randall; it's why they cheered when Ron Dayne won the Heisman and cried when serenaded by 'Varsity.' It's melodramatic and manufactured, but we all understand they are trying to reclaim who they were.
My dad and I now share more than bass fishing on the Wisconsin River; we're bound by this set of collective memories, both interchangeable and wholly unique. It has always been my greatest aspiration to make him proud of me; it almost feels like I'm staring back at my dad from the grass, cradling that football in my hands and wishing the moment would never end.
