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“I’ll see you around campus!” I call back to my wife as I head out the door. 

It’s an expression I borrowed from my brother Billy, who first started  saying it back in the day. Fifty years ago, more or less. A little joke. For there’s no campus and we’re not eager co-eds from the 1950s. Get it?

And now I’ve adopted that phrase as my own. Not that anyone ever laughs. It’s not about getting a big reaction. The expression pleases me, tickles my fancy; it connects me to my past, and my brother, who I don’t see or talk to much anymore. I know, I know. I am a failed and foolish person. But I still carry Billy around in my failed and foolish heart, echoing his words. 

I also channel Billy’s humor when I inquire of a college student, usually the child of a friend, if he’s met any “co-eds” on campus.  

I can’t explain why that amuses me, or why it has persisted across 45-50 years, but it does. Why fight it? Maybe there’s pleasure derived from their puzzled expressions, the hapless groans. We go through life doing our familiar dance steps, hitting our marks, fulfilling low expectations. The cornball dad and lame jokester, coming at you.

Or I’ll channel my mother when a redoubtable opposing baseball player comes up to the plate in a tight spot, and murmur worryingly, “Oh, he’s trouble.”

When I first heard her say that, Mom was talking about the Cardinals 3B Mike Shannon -— a “dangerous RBI man” in the parlance — and it was probably 1968. The years slide past; the names change. Now Trouble arrives with a new face. These days, baseball-wise, Trouble is named Max Muncy. But the idea remains, the voice of my mother still in my ears. And the reverse, when the New York Mets need a hit, I’ll remember her and repeat her comment, “He’s due.”

Once again I’m watching a ballgame, fretfully, as always, and my dear old Mom miraculously sits beside me, both of us working over the same anxiety. The small agonies of fandom. 

“Hell’s bells,” she’d say, exasperated. 

I love the old expressions. For the charms of a lost language, certainly, but also because they provide a lifeline to the past. And the past is the only place where some of my favorite people still reside. 

Some days I’ll remember an expression out of the blue, unbidden. “For the love of Pete!” my mother used to exclaim. 

Who’s Pete? I’d wonder. Is he a substitute for God? How did Pete get that big job?

I surmise, thinking now, that Pete must be Saint Peter, an important guy once upon a time, busy guarding the gate into heaven, I guess. I wouldn’t know. The expression has fallen from common use, like so many before it.

But oh, it feels good to hear those words coming from my own mouth. Keeping it alive. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she’d cry. My brother’s humor, the expressions of my late mother. Our glorious, battered, yellowing past. Dissolving in my memory. Still clinging to it, connecting with it, even as it fades away, like an old polaroid snapshot left out in the sun. 

Thanks for reading, folks. And in the meantime . . . 

I’ll see you around campus!