This weekend I had one of those transcendent experiences that doesn’t happen to me much anymore.

I went down to the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the 140th anniversary celebration of the Virginia Glee Club, the men’s chorus I sang with in college and law school. It was my first visit to Grounds (as we call the UVa campus) since my previous visit in 2003. I lived and/or worked at UVa from 1991 to 1999, so this weekend felt like a time warp, like the events of my life had been chopped up and rearranged in a different order. Things that happened in the 1990s seemed more real and recent to me than anything that has happened in the last decade.

I took Amtrak down to C’ville on Friday morning, checked into my room at the Red Roof Inn around 2 pm, and then made a beeline for the Rotunda. I had a few hours to kill before the weekend’s festivities started, and I wanted to take a long walk to see what had changed and what had stayed the same.

I walked around Central Grounds and saw the Special Collections Library, which is new since my last visit. More importantly, I visited the three dorms I lived in during undergrad. I didn’t actually go in, but I took lots of photos.

Neurons in my brain associated with different memories kept firing in random order. I was at UVa from age 17 to age 25, so while walking around on Saturday, I’d suddenly feel 19 years old, and then 17, and then 18, then 22, and so on. Years in my life were more distinct back then, because I changed so much during that time; I was a very different person in my second year of college than I was in my first, and I was even more different during my third and fourth years than I was in either of the first two. In different years I lived in different places and had different friends and was part of different social groups. It wasn’t really until my third year that my college life began to gel.

I saw so many people this weekend that I hadn’t seen in ages, and a few that I hadn’t even remembered until this weekend. I got to reconnect with four different conductors. There was a reception. There was a concert. There was a banquet. There was lots of singing. There was lots of drinking. I ate a Gusburger at 2 in the morning. I visited the Glee Club house. I got very little sleep.

God, it was a great weekend.

And now I somehow slip back into the present.