Macalester College

Me, when I was younger and still thin, balancing on my bike in front of the old Student Union at Macalester College. The jersey advertises Cycle City, sponsor of the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club's racing team. Photo by Tim Haviland in the summer of 1981. (This is the bike I just restored .)

Grand Avenue @ Fairview, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Macalester College, St. Paul.

Macalester College Reunion 2007; Saint Paul.

Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All-Class Picnic.

Macalester College Reunion (All-Class Picnic), 2007.

A flower a day for January .... This Iris lives at Macalester College, in front of Kagin Commons (which, oddly, I still think of as NDH, even though it's no longer either N ew nor a D ining H all--and had already been renamed after Dr. Kagin when I returned to school for my senior year).

Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota. If there's a standard Macalester photo, this is it. I once took a class in this building where I (temporarily) learned what to call all those architectural features. I've mostly forgot them, but I'm safe in describing the style as Richardsonian Romanesque. Ernie Sandeen taught that Architectural History class. Jim Stewart , who also taught in Old Main, just called it "That Victorian Pile," which works just fine.

Posting this photo because I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom last week. One of Franzen's scenes takes place in "a senior dorm" at Mac; had the author done just a bit more homework, he'd likely have mentioned Kirk. Well, Kirk was a senior dorm when I was a senior, anyway. In 1982. In 1967, when I was a freshman (long story, not today), Dupre & Doty were new and all the seniors wanted to live there. So I lived in Kirk, in a single. Life was different in the old days. Didn't much like the book, for whatever that's worth.