I picked up my daughter from Mount Holyoke College this week and had time on my hands as she finished her last class. I wandered around the beautiful campus with a feeling of invisibility unique to a 61-year-old man, round, grey and balding shambling through a women's college. The best I could hope for is to be mistaken for a visiting professor in some arcane subject no one ever studies as I was repeatedly dismissed from the youthful coeds' consciousness after fleeting glances.

Lost in reverie after perusing an exhibition about the late Wendy Wasserstein, the Tony-award-winning playwright (Holyoke '71), in the college art museum, I turned a corner and there through an open door in a small, dimly lit auditorium was an actual college class under way. A balding professor with a flowing white beard was in the front of the room leaning towards the students, many with glowing laptops, reclined in various attitudes in the auditorium seats. All I heard him say in a measured mellifluent voice was: "You are a composite of everyone you ever met."

I retreated lest I interrupt the class. I did not know anything about the class, the professor, the subject or the course. I did not recognize the quote, if that is what it was. I did not know the point he was making or whether he personally believed the statement. Yet my mind was officially boggled as that simple statement has returned to me over and over again.

Perhaps it was my impending 40th reunion at Hamilton coming up next spring but I have become nostalgic for college days when big thoughts on big subjects were routinely discussed inside and outside the classroom. All the myriad thoughts, worries, concerns of daily life crowd out esoteric themes and concepts beloved of academia that have no practical application except perhaps to help make sense of the broader world around us and our place within that world.

I wish I had not skipped so many classes in college. I wish I had better retention of the discussions and the subjects we discussed. I wish I had not bailed out of philosophy. I wish I had not narrowed my course of study to pursue a law degree and thought of all the subjects I could have studied that would have broadened my reference points. Last night I dreamed I was back in a college classroom, unprepared as usual. Dreams fade and need to be renewed.