I can't remember what the Wartburg library used to be called.

These last couple of months I've gotten to go back to college, in a sense. I have several friends from EWALU who are students at Wartburg or Luther and I've spent some time on both campuses (campi?), hanging out with college students in college dorms and going to student activities events and even sitting in on a class. Talk about opening up the memory floodgates; I've been in school quite a bit since Wartburg but never in college (if I can presume to refer to them as different things - if you're just at an institution for the academics, that's school. College is the rest of the experience). During September and October I've played Frisbee in the U, sat down in Whitehouse Business Center to check my e-mail, watched TV in a Grossmann dorm room. I've listened to students wail and gnash their teeth over a professor who assigns too much reading, watched the casual dating patterns that can only survive in an environment where thousands of demographically and age-ologically similar people live within a block of each other, and been invited to participate in the college nightlife (talk about making one feel old). It triggers powerful memory after powerful memory; I maintain that my time at EWALU was the most shaping influence of my late teens/early twenties, but 62 weeks at camp can't compete with 12 semesters at Wartburg for sheer volume of memories. Mostly, I find, it's the little things that I remember and smile about. I walk through Grossmann Hall and remember the Nerf Gun wars that were so very focusing and helpful to our studies during finals week 1997, or I look at the new Student Union and think of the Frisbee Golf holes that used to be where the new construction now is. Even being at Luther triggers floods of memories - last weekend I was in Decorah to celebrate a camp friend's birthday and one of his friends proudly showed me the quote board hanging on his dorm room wall. Barely even a page long. Amateurs.

It's been a fantastic outlet for memories of a very happy time, but there has been a glitch, if you will. An annoyance. Three weeks ago I was in Waverly with a camp friend who goes to Luther. We were waiting for some Wartburg EWALU-ians to finish classes so I took him for a tour of the campus. We walked past the Bob & Sally Vogel Library and I said, "It wasn't called that when I was in school here - Bob Vogel was still the president. It was... uh..."

Complete blank. I've been trying since then to remember with no luck (I sort of expected it to come to me as I was writing this post, but alas. I think it started with an M. Mc...something?). It's driving me nuts, probably more so than is strictly warranted. I want to continue enjoying this flow of college memories and continue being thankful for what a great experience it was without having those memories marred by not being able to remember something as basic as the name of the stupid library. Any of you out there whose memories are better than mine, please chime in.

In completely unrelated news, I learned today that 2006 will be the last year that October gets to be the longest month. I think that's a shame; I always thought it was cool that my birthday month was the longest month of the year. Apparently that doesn't factor into the decision-making process of the Powers That Be, though - the Daylight Saving Time shift will be moving to November next fall so October will lose its one-hour edge and settle back into a 7-way tie for longest.

Boo.

Update 11/2 - Engelbrecht (scroll down to the "1970s")!!! Engelbrecht Library, it was it was! Man, that's a relief.