Carry me back to old Virginny

Greetings from Fairfax, Virginia. I arrived here on Saturday to attend a friend’s wedding and to attend a job fair tomorrow. This past weekend was filled with multiple reminders of both my life prior to business school and also my life at UVA.

 

On Saturday night, I drove to the Ballston section of Arlington to go to my favorite bar. After failing to find street side parking, I parked at the garage at Ballston Commons two blocks away. While heading toward the shopping mall exit, I passed by a bar with an orange sign announcing that the local UVA Alumni club was meeting to watch the football game against Maryland and decided to watch the remainder of the game. At the bar, I ran into three UVA alums I know – each I have known from a different part of my life, one from school, one from work, and one from somewhere else. The game ended in a photo finish. Words cannot describe the excitement in the room when Virginia’s #5 Mikell Simpson scored a touch town in the last 20 seconds, winning the game for Virginia (by one point) and breaking the record for the longest winning streak in the history of the UVA football program. I left the bar as a group of younger, more rowdy alums had just finished joining hands to sing the Good Old Song.

 

The wedding yesterday was beautiful. I got to spend some quality time with many people from UVA whom I have not seen in a long while. One good friend of mine and I swapped stories about our mutual friends and experiences from college. Many of  our sentences began with “whatever happened to” or  “did I ever tell you about that time when.” There was one girl whom I had not since graduation nine years ago. She looks so different that it wasn’t until she told me she is the correspondent fora major news organization that I recognized who I was talking to.

 

This weekend is making me begin to look forward to the 2008 Reunion Weekend.