Dillon Hall Diaries: Personal Prophecies And Yellow Caps

It is my understanding that Facebook members have Throwback Thursday every week.  I do not participate in Facebook, but I do post occasionally on ND Nation, a discussion board for Notre Dame alums and fans. Throwback Thursdays have not made an appearance on NDN.  Instead, we have Confession Fridays.  If a poster feels guilty or embarrassed about something personal, such as liking the Backstreet Boys or drinking foo foo cocktails, he can get it off his chest by coming clean on Fridays with a confessional post.  He may get ridiculed or drilled with some replies that are zingers -- his penance, you might call it -- but he'll go forward with a clear conscience and a sense of relief.

Since today is Friday, I thought I might employ a similar approach for this post.  I hereby confess that, over the years, I have continued to get a kick out of what could be labeled the "Personal Prophecy Game." Hopefully that does not make me a bad person, but if it does, so be it.  No one is perfect, least of all me.

The Genesis: My first exposure to the Personal Prophecy Game was in the winter of my sophomore year at Notre Dame.  Our basketball team had a road game against Michigan State on a weekend night, and five of us decided that the Irish needed our support in that hostile environment.  There was no love lost between ND students and Michigan, only in those days it was the Spartans, not the Wolverines, that got our hackles up.  So, we piled into a friend's car to make the round trip to East Lansing, a distance of approximately one hundred fifty miles from The Bend.  As we were driving through Niles, Dowagiac or some other small burg in southwestern Michigan, we saw a bedraggled guy stumbling along the sidewalk with a bottle of cheap wine in his grasp.  "Hey Sully," one of my companions called out to our friend riding shotgun, "that's you in five years!"  Thus, the Personal Prophecy Game was born; group hilarity ensued.

Since that initial joke went over so well, we kept it up every time we spotted some down-on-his-luck, oddly dressed or erratically acting Michigander.  Sometimes, in the interest of good sportsmanship, I suppose, the jokester would make himself the butt of the wisecrack by proclaiming, "That's me in five years," as he pointed out a clueless target.

That good natured (although certainly unchristian, not to mention juvenile) ribbing reoccurred all the way to the Michigan State campus.  In our defense, it's important to point out that no one outside the confines of the car was aware of our Personal Prophecies.  Of course, that didn't make it right, but we were quite pleased that we were able to entertain ourselves for the duration of what would otherwise have been an uneventful ride.

The Middle Stages: Notre Dame hosts a reunion weekend every year in early June.  The classes that have graduated exactly five years, or a multiple of five years, prior to the reunion year are invited.  The first one I attended was my twenty year reunion in 1989.  The two most memorable things about that weekend were the beer tents stationed on the North Quad until 2:00 in the morning, and Lou Holtz making the rounds to talk to each of the ten or more classes which were separately assembled for their class dinners throughout campus.  This was the year after Lou's football team had won the National Championship in just his third season at the helm.  As Lou spoke he had all of us wrapped around his little finger, and believing that, finally, the gridiron glory days of Fighting Irish football were now permanently restored.

One reunion tradition is that members of the class celebrating its fiftieth year as alums are presented with yellow ND baseball caps.  (Why they are not gold, to be consistent with the university's colors of blue and gold, is an unsolved mystery.)  Thus, another recollection from that twenty year gathering was watching the fifty year guys, who (if my math is correct) graduated in 1939, donning their yellow caps.   Although my classmates and I were in our early forties, far removed from our crazy college years, the fifty year gents seemed borderline ancient.  We thought they certainly appeared to be much more than thirty years older than us.

Even at the second reunion I attended, which was ten years later in 1999, the guys in the yellow caps clearly bore little resemblance to us.  They moved more slowly, had less hair, drank less beer, didn't seem that impassioned about the football team, and went to bed a whole lot earlier than my fellow '69ers.  Many of them never even made an appearance at the beer tents!

Nearing The End:  Earlier this month I attended my forty-fifth year ND reunion.  Although many of my classmates have never missed any of our eight previous reunions, this year's gathering was only the third time for me.  The fifty year "boys" and their spouses were lodged in the Morris Inn.  (An aside: My two "wish list" items regarding campus visits are to stay in the Morris Inn and to watch a football game from the press box. To date, I have done neither.)  The next oldest class, mine, was given the honor of being housed in the newest dorm, Ryan Hall, built in 2009.  Ryan, which happens to be a women's dorm during the school year -- none of the twenty-nine residence halls at ND is coed -- bears little resemblance to the guys' dorms of yesteryear.  Elevators, air conditioning, a beautiful lobby/sitting room, cushy hallway carpets, brightly lit and nicely tiled lavatories, wood paneling in the common areas; this place makes Dillon look like a quonset hut.

Our class Mass was celebrated by a classmate, Father John Sheehan, SJ, in the Ryan Hall Chapel.  After introducing himself, Father John assured us that even though there would be no collection basket making its way through the pews, what followed would, in fact, qualify as a bona fide Mass.  He also thanked the class reunion organizers for deciding to dispense with singing (although we did end up singing the Notre Dame Alma Mater as an ad hoc recessional).

The most sobering moment of the Mass occurred when the list of the names of our deceased classmates was read from the pulpit.  I was expecting maybe a dozen, or at most a couple of dozen.  No; if only we'd been that lucky. Instead, one hundred fifty names were recited.  One hundred fifty!  I was stunned.  That number represented over ten percent of the Class of '69.

Although mortality, especially my own, was the farthest thing from my mind when I'd set foot on campus earlier that Friday afternoon, the litany of our departed mates brought such thoughts to the fore.  Memories of the Personal Prophecy Game crept into my head.  When we were young, the unlikely connections between the game's jokesters and the targets were absurd.  There was a direct correlation between the level of absurdity and the degree of humor. Now a mere five years separated us sixty-niners from the gents in the yellow caps.  Where did the absurdity go?  We could no longer pretend (or hope) that we were so far removed from the museum pieces. Maybe in the eyes of the young alums, we were the museum pieces! Taking a good look at those guys hobbling out of the Morris Inn gave us a reasonable forecast of how we'd look at our next reunion, if, indeed, we make it that far.  I looked at some of them and said to myself, "That's me in five years."