No one ever wanted to take the Sunday 3 – 6 shift in the writing center at Hampden-Sydney. Or at least they didn’t way back in the early ’90s when I was there. That was the time for curing the Saturday night hangover — usually by consuming a bit of the hair of the dog while watching the late game. (Because back in the day, there wasn’t any of this Sunday Night Football business. Primetime football was for Mondays, dammit. The way God intended. Or at least the way that God would have intended if She could be bothered to care about grownups playing games on an obscure planet in the corner of a tiny galaxy. Or if She existed in the first place. But I digress. Also, get off my lawn Sunday Night Football.)

Anyway, no one ever wanted that 3 – 6 shift. As a sophomore, I got stuck with it. What with Hampden-Sydney’s tradition of letting people choose things by class, and freshmen being excluded from working at the writing center, it was bottom-of-the-barrel for sophomores. So there I was, first semester sophomore year, in the writing center at 3 every Sunday.

Turned out, though, it wasn’t so bad. No one ever came in for help. I saw a bare handful of people that first semester (see above re: beer and football.) Occasionally my roommate John would come by to “shoot the shit,” a phrase that I probably haven’t heard since those days. But mostly it’d just be me, a handful of Mac Classic II computers and a 3.5″ floppy disk with MacWrite II (color screens and no boot disk FTW!), and three hours of enforced study time. Or, later on, the internet. Or, back then, the Internet — still capitalized, and pre-GUI.

Those Sunday evenings ended up being one of the highlights of the week. A time to reflect on the week gone by, maybe do a bit of work (less often than I should have, and certainly less often than I’d do if I had the whole thing to do over.) Or, more often, lounging on the (really awful) couch with a (usually even awfuller) SF novel. At 6 (or a little later depending on the novel), I’d walk across the courtyard to the dining hall. Sunday dinner was always social — in my circle, anyway. We would gather around our table and discuss our respective weekends. Sometimes that meant reliving the parties we’d all attended together anyway. Others it meant catching up after the Great Away Football Game Weekend Diaspora, hearing what everyone had done.

I most remember those evenings — just three of them over the course of my entire H-SC career, when I would walk out of the writing center and discover that it was totally dark at 6 p.m. It would take me just a moment to remember where I was and what was happening. The time had changed. Fall was officially here. Midterms were just around the corner, and then a final sprint to Thanksgiving and the end of the semester. The blazer would feel downright comfortable at the last few remaining football games. Soon they might even have to turn the heat on in the dorms. Fall had arrived in full, and I would take just a moment — but, like with the studying, not quite as long as I should have, or as I would if I had it to do over again — to soak in my surroundings and to think to myself, there isn’t anyplace quite as nice as Hampden-Sydney in the fall.

Welcome back fall. It’s good to see you again.