I experienced something tonight I haven’t experienced for a very long time.

I remember two buses going from Camden Catholic High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey to Notre Dame my junior year in high school to check out Notre Dame as a possible college. We left on a Thursday, spent the entire weekend, took in a Notre Dame game in which Terry Hanratty threw countless passes for a 51-7 win over the Illini and it proved to be the most exuberating foreplay for anybody who ever wanted to go to Notre Dame. The bench quarterback, by the way, slated to start the next year when Terry Hanratty graduated, was a young sophomore named Joe Thiesman.

The entire trip was magical. We were high school juniors, seeing each other for the very first time in a very different environment, for a 700+ mile bus trip from our homes in South Jersey to South Bend, Indiana.

It didn’t get much better… and I remember it to this day.

We had the intellectuals, congregating on one side of one of the two buses, incessantly chatting about some existential principle that none of us could agree on. We had women, potentially as intellectual as we were, but far more interested in the young men taking the trip.

I remember Noreen Nugent, a fellow forensics participant on whom I had a crush throughout my entire high school years, making out with some loser whom I’m know she didn’t marry and whose relevance we all questioned at the time… including Noreen.

We had fellow students who took medications for bad coughs; friends who had nightmares in the dark; and others who couldn’t sleep through the night, a translucent bus ride to a contingent future.

That memory has remained with me for 40 years.

And is as vivid today as it was back then.

So as I have our neighbors’ kids sleeping over our house tonight—the girls across the street—and our boys also here—I remembered yet again what it was like.

It’s 2:00 a.m. and I finally managed to get the last one back asleep. There are 6 of them with only 2 who are mine. One had a bad cough. And one had anxiety attacks identical to the last time he attempted to sleep over.

Since his father was a lawyer, I told him stories of when I practiced law and I did my best to intrigue him reminiscing of a time in which I too felt sick to my stomach, drinking carbonated liquids and downing bread, to settle my stomach before trial. I knew, in the making, that it had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with psychology. But at the end of the day, I had emails to complete, paperwork to process, and some semblance of a night’s sleep to put behind me.

The night unfolded and I eventually went to bed about 3:00, reflecting on a memory of close to 40 years ago as I was startled, bewildered, and titillated by the personal stories of each and every person on that bus as we all drove to Notre Dame together attempting unsuccessfully to hide our inner demons and our outward fears.

Original writing date: February 18, 2008

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