Letters To Lyla

Dear Lyla,

The tradition of homecoming dates back over 100 years with the NCAA crediting the University of Missouri (my PhD alma mater) as the first official homecoming in 1911. At the time, the intent was to make sure that a big rival football game against the KU Jayhawks (still rivals to this day) was well attended. It was so successful a tradition was born. It is now part of the cultural fabric of American schools in the fall months. While most homecoming celebrations still center around a football game, the weeklong festivities focus on the institution as the common thread that ties alums together. Connections that are intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and international are forged and reinforced in an intense weekend of comradery and gaiety.

Wartburg’s homecoming is this weekend. The trees are decked with ribbons of black and orange, the fountain is flowing freely, windows are painted with messages of welcome to those who came before and, even though it is gloomy and rainy outside, the halls are buzzing with the excitement that only homecoming can generate. Shortly after lunchtime today I fully expect to see former students drop in to say hello; this will continue throughout the weekend, and it is my favorite thing about homecoming.

While you are my most important legacy, and I am so grateful that I have the title of mom as well as professor, education is my second calling right behind motherhood. You have been around the halls of Wartburg long enough to know that you have many student “siblings.”  I very much look forward to their return and hearing about what has been going on in their lives. I rejoice at their family and career milestones and give them a shoulder to cry on when life is sometimes cruel. I think that sometimes the lessons I teach about relationships and building community may be the most important one can learn. Human nature is so complex, so intricate, and its understanding so elusive that we are all lifelong students of the human condition. One day you will, I hope, be a student at Wartburg and your relationship with the campus will utterly change and I am thrilled at the prospect of watching that from a front row seat. I will observe how you will commune with the squirrels, lose your voice at Kastle Kapers, have so much orange and black in your wardrobe that you could open a Spirit Halloween franchise, and sing the loyalty song from memory as you sway with your friends to the rhythm of the melody. All these things that I wish for you are the same that I hope have stayed with those we will welcome home this week and, that Wartburg, as the song says, is the college of their brightest days.