It is a little odd walking the pathways of my old college. I graduated from here in 2001 and have hardly been back. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would the students look at me the wrong way? Would I get singled out by public safety for walking on campus?

But it wasn’t life altering. I walked up to the library and sat down to write. It feels good being back. I could feel the energy of the students busy at work on their class work, researching something for a big project, or just studying to understand their course work.

I felt like a reporter looking left and right for a place to sit and write. I watched students so into their work that they hardly paid attention to people passing by their table.

I loved this library, it felt like the town hall of the campus. The campus of the CUNY, College of Staten Island is huge. It has many separate buildings for students to take their classes in. There is a gym, a cafeteria, an arts center where some important borough meetings have been held and the library. New rules make people visiting the college park in a lot about a mile away from the library. But that is fine this cool winter day. It wasn’t bone shattering cold so walking was fine and good exercerse.

You can tell if a college is really busy if you look at its parking lots. This college has an over flowing amount of cars. Everywhere you looked was a place a car parked or had parked. There was even news of dorms to be built on campus for students who wanted to live on campus and stop the hassle of commuting.

It was obvious that sooner or later this place was going to get more and more crowded. Library hours would be extended, cafeteria hours would be extended and even Gym hours. Once you make the transition to sleep away school services around the campus have to be open round the clock. Say you just moved into this future dorm. You have to eat, study, and exercise, hence, extended hours.

This will be great for me because better hour’s means better times to use the library and gym. But for now I have to deal with library being open till 5 on the weekends when I can park close by, and not have to walk a mile to get to my car.

Sadly though the library is not the same as it was when I first started college. It has lost a lot of the great periodicals I love to read. Even reading a newspaper you have a backlog of 2-3 days to get the current addition.

But I love its cubicles. No where can you get a lot of privacy and write undisturbed then this library.

I walk around reminiscing on how things have changed, a hall way that wasn’t part of the original layout, an office taking up what was a row of periodicals. I pass a student initialing his name into a table. At one time I would have called this vandalism, but now it seems from not one clean piece of that table that people are leaving a record that they were here passing through in life.

It was this spirit of education helping students make more of themselves that I don’t even think they understood. This spirit soaked you as you entered this study complex like other college libraries. It made you feel that there was so much more that you could accomplish and gave me inspiration to write.