Sunday Essay: On Alumni Hall, and on the Grace of Allegiance

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, January 24^th. It is the 28^th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On South Bend, and the Liberation of Isolation

Last week, I mentioned a weekend nine years ago in South Bend. I mentioned my brother’s roommate, Andy. I mentioned wading past the football practice fields, and Andy’s exasperated lamentation of lake-effect snow. It was a memorable moment, but it wasn’t the most significant thing that happened over those three days—at least in my life.

Earlier that day, Will took me down to Father George’s apartment, and helped me ask Father George to pull me into Alumni Hall.

Depending on your familiarity with Notre Dame, this sentence might need some explaining. Notre Dame has something like three dozen dorms. They’re single-sex dorms, and the school doesn’t have a Greek system, so the dorms often fill that void, at least in a way. There’s a pride in the dorms, and while my perception is that the tribality is fading, it was still thriving during my years on campus in many of the buildings, including Alumni Hall, which is where Father George Rozum had, over four decades by the time he retired, built a powerhouse of a dorm culture as the building’s rector.

Father George, since we’re on the topic, is of a rare sort. Thin, short, and formerly mustachioed, he’s grown frail now, but even when I first heard of him, he was famous for his soft voice and his mischievous streak. He was quick and clever even in his old age, and while I’m not the one to know how quickness and cleverness develop or don’t as one grows old, I suspect—based on yearbook photos and old yarns—that his was always there, and was perhaps even more crackling in his middle decades.

My oldest brother, Michael, was drafted into Alumni Hall based purely on chance. The forecast he received heading in seemed mixed: small rooms, good location, no air conditioning, great culture but every dorm says that. For me, entering seventh grade at the time and rather obsessed with Notre Dame, any dorm would have likely provoked the same reaction the weekend we dropped him off: a searing, envious impatience. I remember vividly looking at his desk, crammed into a cubby beneath his bed with his wardrobe at his back, and thinking, “I have to wait six whole years to live this.”

But while the reaction that day would’ve likely been the same no matter the dorm, I’m not sure the five years that followed would have stoked the fire like they did had Michael not been randomly assigned to live in the Dawghouse (as it was more than occasionally known to its residents). With our hometown as close to O’Hare as it is, Michael regularly brought friends home to stay a night on their way out of town before holidays and breaks. When Will was pulled into Alumni Hall by Father George three years later (each rector, at the time—and this still may be the case—could handpick something like ten percent of his or her incoming freshman class), the cycle continued. There are few things cooler as a teenage boy than when college guys are nice to you, and the combination of their kindness and the stories they’d tell around our dinner table kept me longing for the day I, myself, would get to attend Notre Dame, and God (and Father George) willing, live in Alumni Hall. Two or three times a year, I was visited, I thought, by my future. These friendships would be mine. These sorts of people would be in my life.

This five-year exposure to Alumni Hall reached a major effect during my sixth year of waiting. In the short answer portion of my application to Notre Dame, when asked why I wanted to attend the school, I didn’t talk about the school.

I talked about Alumni Hall.

I talked about my brothers’ friends coming back to spend the night before flights home. I talked about staying in the dorm as a high schooler, getting to ever-so-briefly glimpse that college experience. I talked about the friendships my brothers made, how those friends were their best in the world, and how I wanted to form friendships like those.

Whether because of the short answer or because of my ACT score, I was admitted to Notre Dame, and whether because of Will’s help in my visit to Father George or just the fact that Father George liked Will and Michael, I wound up in Alumni Hall. And Alumni Hall didn’t disappoint.

But I did.

In addition to Andy’s lament, I mentioned last week that my relationship with the university world in South Bend was equal parts love, disappointment, and fatigue.

A significant deal of those latter two parts revolved around friendship.

Notre Dame, during my time, pushed students towards being in a “group.” It wasn’t an explicit thing, and it arose naturally, but for various innocuous reasons, that didn’t happen for me my freshman year. I didn’t slot into a group. My friendships were more individualized, and that required more upkeep, and friendship upkeep was not something I did particularly well. It was especially not something I did well when I started dating Emma our sophomore year. I’d been balancing things rather precariously, and a few months into the relationship, it all crashed down. I was in over my head in class. I was stretched thin with singing commitments. It was my first real relationship, and I was terrified of losing it, and in the ensuing, often-torturous anxiety (the two years spanning from the back half of sophomore year through the front half of senior year were likely the worst two of my life thus far), I didn’t invest much time on friendships. I let some of the closest ones drift away.

You have to have a biggest regret in life. Mathematical law dictates that every set must have a maximum, and thus, one regret must be bigger than the rest. This abandonment of friendships, or in other cases the unfulfillment of ones I thought destined to grow, remains, at this still-early time in my life, my biggest regret. I did not get the group of friends I expected I would get. Only one of my groomsmen wound up being a Dawg. I did not bring roommates home to spend the night before flying out of O’Hare.

But I still had Alumni Hall.

I hesitate to try to characterize Alumni Hall. I’ve seen many try. I’ve found some accounts to be overstatements, and I fear understating as well (I do, objectively as I can, believe Alumni Hall was, for the median ninety percent or so, a stronger, more positive community than that in any other dorm during my years at Notre Dame). So I’ll caveat this: I’ll try to only speak to my own experience.

While I lacked the tight, nuclear pack so many had, I always felt, and still today feel, a belonging to a broader, uniquely aligned tribe.

There are moments of camaraderie—little ones, so often—where allegiance to something grander than a friendship (and that’s not to diminish the grandeur of friendships) pulls two or more people into a quasi-spiritual unity. This is the best I, right now, can describe the experience of having been a Dawg. It was more than just the community of living with one another, which happened in every dorm on campus, and was a blessing in so many. It was more than just the silly things, which again happened in every dorm on campus (and elsewhere), and were again a divine kindness. It was something I would guess Father George bred into the place—a respect, not just for one another, but for the whole of the thing, for the whole of Alumni Hall, that turned, in a surprisingly lasting fashion, into allegiance. This manifested most often in small moments: At Mass. On retreat. In the hallway late at night. At bars. At tailgates. During Wake Week (which must, for a multitude of reasons, remain shrouded in mystery). It would happen within moments. Often times it was just a passing of the peace, or a nod in passing. But many times, you would meet someone, or find yourself talking to someone you hardly knew, and immediately find yourself aligned with them. Close to them. Connected with them. It was a sort of shalom, a benevolent unification, through the simple connection of being a Dawg. I might be overthinking what it is. Perhaps allegiance is too broad a word. But the fealty to the dorm—the dedication of such a sweeping majority to its cultural upkeep—calls that word to mind. Our allegiance was to Alumni Hall, and to Father George. And that spiritual aquifer made us, in the most positive sense, a tribe.

My closest friends were not made in Alumni Hall. A few were. But not in the sense I expected, and with many friendships that were nearly among the closest dashed along the wayside. I didn’t have the world in there so many have and had. And yet I still had it—I still had the dorm. For that stretch of time, and in threads that carry forward: threads of not just community, but allegiance, and the unity allegiance brings.

I do not know the current state of Alumni Hall. Father George retired recently. Everyone I lived with in that building has moved on. Like so many things in these essays, Alumni Hall’s future is cloaked in uncertainty, and even its present is opaque to my eyes.

But that unity lives on. And regrets and all, what a gift to share and have shared that unity. To share and have shared that shalom. To share, and have shared, that allegiance.

Next week’s essay: On Rocks