Bypassing the Boola Boola

“Boola Boola” is the name of a Yale football fight song and a chant akin to “rah-rah” that signifies devotion to the college. I always felt like an ass in situations that called for me to chant “boola boola” along with others—I am just not that guy.

It is now Boola Boola time once again. As I publish this blog entry, my 40th college reunion is underway. I have feelings about skipping it. Some part of me would love to return to Yale to visit with old compatriots and show Joe my former stomping grounds. I have not visited the campus since the mid-80s.

But a more dominant part of me keeps me at home here in Cleveland, wondering what it must be like to go roaring into old haunts without an ounce of dread or ambivalence.

Don’t get me wrong. I have indelible, grateful memories of Yale. Diverse and inspiring classmates, professors who were legends in their fields, mind-expanding curricula, a sprawling, collegiate gothic campus, and the sense of unbridled possibility that came with being young and away from home for the first time all contributed to my life’s journey. It was a meaningful stop but not an anchor to which I would boomerang back.

Alas, it is a quarrel within me. Even now, I am still not sure I have made peace with the person I was when I attended Yale. That guy was a slightly screwed-up, anxious, closeted student who hid behind Milton and Shakespeare while deferring becoming his own man—an allusion to the title of another Yalie’s indelible memoir of growing up closeted at Yale.

While some classmates revealed their true selves to others in hallowed secret societies or bonded over gold and green cups at Mory’s, the emotions I recall from my “bright college years” involved hiding from myself and others. Self-suppression is not something I particularly wish to celebrate, nor do I find it enticing to comingle with former classmates forty years after the fact with an agenda of setting records “straight.”

Revisiting Yale feels like I would be colluding with a false and self-limiting idea of who I was and who I was meant to be. That’s a lot of baggage to take to a three-day weekend.

So on the eve of Pride 2024, with a pang of missing out but a larger measure of gratitude for being my own man at my present age, I once again say “no thanks” to reunions, choose to leave the past in the past and bypass the boola-boola.