by ALEX VOLPE

Bricks and concrete clad in glass and metal, adorned with new light every day. The memorial Union is much a destination on a map, the center of come. This is no accident but neither is it permanent. As our perspectives twist and turn to meet our callings and dreams, so too do our maps. One day, the center of everything we know disappears and reappears tucked into another city, another country—maybe another planet. Like home thought, it isn’t the house we keep near our hearts, nor the doorsteps or lawn. Rather, an idea we carry with us forever, something entirely transient yet ever-present.

When I’ve moved on, the Memorial Union as I know it today will cease to exist. Not by deconstruction or forgetfulness but something more akin to the closing of a good book. One stained by time, with dog-eared pages and margin notes t hat tell stories in their own right. A book that, some day, I’ll share as a gift.
Whether all you remember is a staircase or a carpet, maybe a couch you called your own at eight in the morning every Thursday for a term, or a smile from a stranger who wasn’t so strange—it is all the same. I’ll remember concerts, movies, and speakers I never heard of in the lounge; flags, people, and the delicate sounds of life and commerce in the concourse; a ballroom ever ready for the local masses, the sound of wet shoes on marble, lines to buy books and longer lines to sell them back. The quad: a green reflection of all that is the Memorial Union, most especially so in the spring. A custodian who greeted me every time I saw him for five years. The smell of popcorn and coffee, a thousand new faces every day, the Internet, clean bathrooms and food I couldn’t afford.

In any the case I can’t vouch for anyone else but when I’ve gone, when I’m handed a new map with a new center, the Memorial Union will become that something else—something unmistakably mine, a gift from all the people I knew here and from everyone I never met; all of us talking, sharing, teaching, and learning—but mostly just all of us being and being together.

I suppose, whether or not we see it, we’re all holding each other afloat here. Complete strangers or best friends, heroes or just people you love—we’re all sharing a moment of overlap in each of our stories, like a flash of light that can’t be missed but can’t be caught. One that will sit comfortably in the back of my mind forever as the real lesson I learned at Oregon State. This is the way of the Memorial Union. We are the blood of this building, the spirit of the experience. It lives with us and we live with it.