Three Short Stories About Innis College

Prepared for the Innis College Admission and Leadership Awards Ceremony

By Jared Bland ( 2003, HBA INNIS)

1)
On October 28, 1999, my mother called me in the late morning to inform me that, after twenty years of marriage, she was leaving my father. Then she asked if she could come from Illinois to visit me while she decided what to do next. This was fewer than two months after I’d started university—I was still in the baby bird stage of adjustment, still trying to make friends and impress people enough for them to remember my name. Anxious about her arrival and not knowing whom to turn to, I made an appointment with then-Dean of Residence, Garry Spencer. Garry listened to me, calmed me down, and, after I mentioned that I wasn’t sure where she was going to stay, told me that she could stay right here in Innis Residence, in one of the two-person suites that were at the time reserved for visiting faculty. And so it happened that, for a month of my first year, my mother was my next door neighbour. She also happens to be a very good baker, and so she made more friends than I did.

Ten years later, on February 1, 2009, long after I’d left Innis college, I found myself watching my favourite football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, win the Super Bowl on the big screen in Innis town hall, across the street. One of my best friends from school works for the college now, and he’d suggested that a group of us take in the game in style. As I sat sunk low in my chair, I couldn’t help but think of how strange it was to be back—and how strange that I’d so frequently been back over the years, despite feeling when I left that Innis wasn’t a place I’d see much more of.

That’s two stories in one, really, but my point is this: you are part of a special community, unique on this campus in its small size and big heart. Its presence in your life will expand and contract in the years to come, but, somehow, it will be there when you need it, sometimes in ways that you cannot yet imagine.

2)
My girlfriend went to U of T as well. She was at UC, and even though we took the same specialization during the same years, we never crossed paths in undergrad. We met one night in the first few weeks of what was her master’s year, and was the first year of my PhD. She likes to tell a story about her father, who also went to U of T. Her father is a film critic, and as such he often has to go to screenings at the Varsity theatre. When he does, he always parks in the lot at Saint Michael’s college. When Danielle was young, her dad would take her along to screenings sometimes, and, if it was nice outside when they emerged, he would take her on walks through Victoria college, through St. Mike’s, sometimes across Queen’s park to King’s College Circle. He would never miss a chance to be back among these buildings, taking shortcuts long remembered, sharing memories and ideas with his daughter.

What I never realized when I was a student here is that this campus becomes essential in forming the architecture of our lives. Of course, you will leave here shaped and molded intellectually. But something about this place, about its rolling lawns and sharp quadrangles and its baffling mixture of ivy covered elegance and brutalist sixties design, will impress inside each of you a map. You will never forget this map, and revisiting it will become one of the secret pleasures of your life. You will retrace its corridors in your mind. You will come back in person. You will lie on the grass and look up at the trees. You may even be lucky enough to revisit, as I have, the very spot where you first met the person with whom you share your days—for me, the walkway next to the Graduate Student’s Union, the place where my life actually became my life. What I never realized when I was young is that you are, right now, building not only the way you will look at the world. You are building, in the quietest sense, the way that world will look to you.

3)
My favourite Innis memory is a simple one. I was sitting on the grass in the residence quad on a perfect July day with my best friend Dave. This would have been in the summer after my third year. We had both been RAs, and that summer I was working the night shift as a porter at the front desk. (It was, in many ways, the best job I’ve ever had.) Dave and I were sitting on the grass in the sun, drinking coffee from really big mugs and watching some people throw a Frisbee around. I remember the smell of the air. I remember the way the grass felt, still slightly damp, but dry enough for sitting. I remember the sound of big heavy topspin forehands being thwacked back and forth on the tennis courts behind the building. There was just the slightest breeze.

There is nothing special about this memory, except that it’s completely special: a moment of clarity, of dilated time, where everything exists perfectly and nothing is at all, in any way, bad. It’s nothing special, but it’s just to say this. Even if it seems like an abhorrent notion to you now, you will one day become nostalgic for this time, for this place, for these people. Your friends will move away, or you will. You will outgrow some of them, and some of them will outgrow you. A few of them—one or two, if you’re lucky—will stay close, will become pillars of your life. But no matter what happens, you will look back on those days in the quad, on these years at this place, through nostalgia’s gauzy lense.

There’s nothing you can do about that except this: live these moments in whatever true way you can. Because nostalgia will come, and nostalgia is always better if you were paying close attention the first time around.