Remember three decades ago, The Big Chill, a breakout film for Glenn Close, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilley, JoBeth Williams, and–as the dead guy whose face no one ever sees, Kevin Costner? (Clearly, I’m beyond worrrying about dating myself.) The first morning the old college friends are together, each comes into the big country kitchen at a different moment, to find running–well, jogging, back then–shoes that Harold, the successful businessman, has brought for everyone and stacked on the island. Time-lapse photography shows the space filling and emptying and filling again, as the day advances and each person finds his or her size.

I think of that scene often, reminded of it by the scene at my own kitchen counter every Saturday night. Open House can, and often does start with a single student coming in and planting herself or himself opposite me and the ovens, where we’ll chat, just us, for a few minutes. Sometimes, it’s a small gaggle flying in, landing, and lining up there, claiming every one of the six stools, some even doubled up. Often, when I turn to take cookies out of the oven, I turn back to a whole different set of faces, another conversation, new but known voices laughing. The disembodied hand, at the end of a reaching arm, grabs a cookie cooling on the rack; another extends with a napkin ready for one right off the sheet. If I follow the arm up to the shoulder and head, I know who I’m dealing to. The crowd can be dense.

A month or so ago, the experience was even more Big Chillish, the dinner for alums and their friends and families converging with the start of Open House. So there, at the counter, each time I turned, a conflation of eras–someone from a mid-century CdeP class next to a student who just figured out his second term class schedule. Someone’s little sister making friends with someone else’s little sister, both of them elbow-to-elbow with seniors and grads of just last June.

If I had a camera instead of a spatula, you could see it, too, from my point of view. Privileged, I know.

 

(Full disclosure: This photo is from last year. But they’re alums now!)