Birthday Memories: Eureka College, Baseball, and Greek Town, Part One
There are certain birthdays that stay with you—not because of anything dramatic, but because they somehow capture a particular moment in your life before you realized it was already slipping into the pas t. My twenty-eighth birthday in May of 1986 became one of those memories. It was my “golden birthday,” though I probably gave that more importance at the time than it deserved. Still, twenty-eight felt significant to me then. I had just finished my first year at Eureka College after taking a somewhat indirect route through life to get there. Unlike many of the students around me, I had already been in the Air Force, worked different jobs, and spent a few years wandering through uncertainty before finally ending up at a small college in central Illinois trying to reinvent myself. I had decided to stay in Eureka for the summer, working in the cafeteria while catching up on reading and making enough money to survive another school year. A few days before my birthday, my f...
