Wanted: Road-trip Messerly

I went to a Dartmouth alumni party a couple of weeks ago. That was a mistake. I went to a law school reunion five years ago and swore never to go to another. Since parties are like reunions, only shorter and more frequent, I should have thrown the invitation away.

But something stirred my interest when I got the Dartmouth invitation. Maybe I recalled those wild parties when I was in college. Or the impromptu road trips with Road-trip Messerly. I remember once when he and I went to Chicago and back on a three-day weekend in his 1963 Chevrolet. That was nothing for Messerly. He once went to New Orleans on a weekend road trip.

Anyway, when the invitation came and it said "Dartmouth" and the party was at an interesting place at least, I succumbed.

There we were my wife and I aged 35, in a roomful of people the same age or older (the young ones look just as old anyway). Everyone was politely sipping wirie or beer, and, of course, no one got drunk or suggested any road trips or did anything unexpected, which was the same as any other party I've been to except more so.

Let me give you an indication of what these people talk about the same ones who used to plan road trips, wild and raucous parties, raids on Colby Junior College, intrusions into the Mary Hitchcock School of Nursing. First of all, they talk about inflation. Of course, they're all making over $30,000 a year and driving Mercedes diesel sedans, but inflation is the key topic at alumni parties these days. Close behind are the kids and how they are doing in school, followed quickly by long dissertations on what they all did last summer. You might be interested in what these people did last summer traveled in Europe with their families, drove out West and back, went to the beach for a couple of weeks, went to Hanover and ate at the Hanover Inn.

Or worked on their houses. Oh, yes, the houses I almost forgot. After vacations and what they did last summer, the houses are definitely one of the big topics of conversation. First of all, there's the mortgage. How much it's gone up and how much the taxes have gone up. And then there are the costs and complexities of the repairs that have to be done. And the insulation that has to be put in. And the high cost of heating fuel. Some of these alumni can talk for 15 or 20 minutes on the problems they are having with their houses. These problems include, of course, all Of the above plus the fact that their children don't have enough room in the houses and that they are being cramped for space and are being forced to look for new houses now in these inflationary times. (I remember when my roommate, Jeff Greenleaf, and I shared a room in Hanover our senior year. We piled all our dirty clothes in the middle of the floor and sifted through the pile to find something that wasn't too dirty when we needed to change. There wasn't much room and it was kind of messy, but it was fun.) Then there is the Dartmouth football team, always a prime topic of conversation at Dartmouth alumni parties, closely followed by how Bob Blackman is doing at Cornell, and isn't it too bad that Dartmouth didn't hire him back when they had an opportunity.

Current events come next.

Then there is always the fund-raising. At some point in most of the Dartmouth parties, someone steps forward and announces that we should not forget to send our alumni contributions to the college that we are all so proud of.

You would be surprised to hear it, but the above topics of conversation just about exhaust most of the time allotted for most of the Dartmouth alumni parties that I have been to. Nobody gets drunk, nobody raises his voice, nobody makes any unexpected suggestions for something to do afterward, and the orderly crowd disperses when expected to.

So two-thirds of the way through this last Dartmouth party, when I was talking to a very pleasant fellow attorney, I thought I detected in his conversation a similar feeling that these parties might really be kind of boring and not worth attending, an agreement between us that most of the people there were older than they looked even. So I suggested to him that these parties might be kind of worthless. He looked at me funny, and my wife, who was standing with us, looked at me funny. So I felt sort of defensive and I came right out with it: "Dartmouth alumni are boring." "All alumni are boring." (I almost said, "You're boring.")

The responses from my friend and my wife were well-reasoned and predictable. I was accused of having a mid-life crisis arid for about 15 minutes they got on me pretty good. But I had plenty of ammunition on my side no road trips, nobody getting drunk, nobody hiking in the woods, nobody going down to Colby Junior College, and all the rest of it but in the end they wore me down by their arguments that these people really were not that boring. In fact, my wife and friend pointed out, everyone was having a pretty good time, probably a better time than they'd had in college when we were all unhappy for other reasons, even when we were doing all those wild and crazy things I was talking about.

They had a point. I remember some desperate and lonely moments when I was in college. Trying to hitchhike back to Hanover from Boston on Sunday night in the dark in southern New Hampshire when no one would pick me up. Sitting all night in a diner waiting for the first light of dawn to try to get back to Hanover from Saratoga Springs, out of money, tired, assured that I would be late for classes. But I can honestly say that that was one hell of a lot more fun than standing around in a party room with a bunch of people talking about their houses, their jobs, their kids, and where they sperit last summer.

The thing that bothers me the most is that most of the people that I knew in college were real individualists. They did things on their own. And they did what they wanted to do.

I have a real hard time believing that any of the people that I bumped into at that Dartmouth party were individualists ever, and I have no problem at all believing that they sure aren't having any fun doing what they're doing now.

There's only one solution to this problem: road trip. Road-trip Messerly, where are you?

Parker Smith keeps his memories alive while practicing law inBaltimore.