I’ve been reading The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, by John F. Harris. It’s an excellent recap of the Clinton years. Reading it gives me the odd sensation of reliving not just the events in the book, but events of my own life. Clinton opened his presidential campaign just a month after I started college and a mere six weeks after I returned to the U.S. from living overseas. He left office four days after I started this blog and several months into my legal career.

I remember going down to Richmond with the UVa Democrats for a debate-watching party/rally in 1992 and getting to shake Clinton’s hand when he came to the rally afterward. I remember watching the Election Night returns in my tiny New College (now Hereford) dorm room. I remember rushing back from my first American Lit class of the Winter 1993 semester to watch the inauguration on TV. I remember driving up Route 29 to D.C. that summer, listening to a talk radio discussion about the B.T.U. tax. Watching a news report over winter break one year about the impending transfer of Congress to the Republicans… reading about the Oklahoma City bombings in the New York Times in the reading room of Alderman Library, a month from graduation… following the re-election story in my Range room while a first-year law student… first hearing about the Lewinsky affair while watching TV in my living room during my second year of law school… studying for finals the following year in the Glee Club house while the House voted to impeach… watching his airplane-hangar farewell speech in my Jersey City living room after the Bush inauguration.

For me, the Clinton years are synonymous with my UVa years, and both are synonymous with the 1990s. It’s all one big nostalgiafest, and it makes the book that much more enjoyable to read.

Last night was our first chorus rehearsal of the season. It’s the beginning of my third year with the chorus. At this point I’ve probably been in the chorus longer than at least half the group. When did this happen?

The first night of rehearsal always evokes memories for me being at UVa and starting a new year with the Glee Club or the University Singers – the humid September weather, new singers, new music, and in this case, even a “new dorm,” because it was our first rehearsal since Matt and I moved to the Village together over the summer.

During my first year of law school at UVa, I lived on the Range [holy crap – the Range has a selection committee now?], right near UVa’s famous Lawn. At the beginning of that academic year I hung out near the Lawn rooms on the night of fall convocation, when all the undergraduate first years attend a pomp-filled ceremony on the Lawn. I’d attended it as a first-year student five years previously and had returned in subsequent years to sing with one or another of my choruses. The loud buzzing late-summer insects, the sticky air, the young students in their Laura Ashley dresses and their shirts and ties and shorts, all nervous and excited and homesick, unaware of all the new experiences and personal changes in their futures. I always felt nostalgic at fall convocation, and particularly so that night, as I was no longer an undergrad.

I feel a recurrence of that nostalgia every year around this time. Things in life aren’t quite as new, fresh or exciting these days as they used to be. But it’s nice to have a hint of that newness again every once in a while, just to remind me how it feels.

This makes me ill. We have to wait how long until 1/20/09?