Our guest writer today is Andrew Orlebeke. Hi! My name is Andrew Orlebeke. I’m a 2010 graduate who majored in Spanish. I currently live in Washington, D.C. and am working on Capitol Hill after having spent a good portion of my post-college life teaching English in Spain and South Korea. I’m an ardent sports fan, an avid traveler, and a board game aficionado. I’m looking forward to writing with my fellow Knights!
Nearly all of my first twenty-two years of life, right up until graduation, I spent living in Grand Rapids—indeed, not only in Grand Rapids, but in the same five or so square miles on the Southeast side. Since then, I have lived in three different locales that are four thousand, eleven thousand, and six hundred miles from my stomping grounds. My current city of residence—Washington DC—has been my home for fifteen months, the longest span of time I’ve ever lived away from GR.
I mention this because this past weekend I flew back to said stomping grounds for my brother’s graduation. I stayed at my mom’s house in my old room, as I always do. After breakfast at Real Food Cafe (I got the strawberry stuffed French toast—classic good decision) on Sunday morning, I was sitting in my room examining some of my old books and trappings when a distinctly surreal feeling washed over me. Suddenly I was looking through a window into another world, a world more recognizable but also manifestly less real. Things I had taken for granted became startling—some big things, like how far I have been from friends and family, but also plenty of little things, like the decorations hanging on my bedroom walls or the feel of the carpet on my feet.
I have struggled for much of the past four years—and really all through college as well—trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. Some of my lowest valleys, and some of my highest peaks, have come since striking out on my own. It has been frustrating, exhilarating, confusing, rewarding and most of all challenging. Now, four years after my entrance into the “real world,” I still have no idea what I’m doing. But I do finally have a “real” job and the luxury of relaxing a little about my future, so it is perhaps for that reason, and the trigger of the graduation ceremony, that the trip back to my salad days hit me like it did. After years of looking uncertainly ahead, I had returned to a very tangible past, so tangible that I could literally reach out and touch it. And touch it I did, from my Southern Little League trophies to Calvin and Hobbes treasuries to my high school yearbooks. I have intense memories associated with each of these things—chasing down fly balls on the diamonds of Southern, hundreds of breakfasts and lunches spent reading and rereading Weirdos From Another Planet, doing experiments in Mr. Zuidema’s physics class—and countless more. For the next hour I sat on the floor in my bedroom, legs crossed, remembering.
I am no stranger to nostalgia. My mom tells me that when I was younger I used to hug the Christmas tree after it had been taken down and dragged to the curb. I eventually outgrew that behavior—it was unbecoming of a college graduate—but the point stands: I have been known to dwell in the past. It should surprise no one, however, when I say that Washington is a city populated largely by people looking forward. It is easy—to a certain degree, necessary—to get swept up in the continuous striving that courses through the capital. And even outside of the beltway, one’s twenties are not traditionally a time of reflection. Why should we waste time thinking about what has happened when there’s so much out there that could happen? Suffice it to say that the past has gotten only a sliver of my mental pie chart the past few years. Yet it’s always there, shaping my decisions and views and the way I look at the world. No matter how far I travel or what path I choose, I’ll forever be the kid from a small city in Michigan. All things considered, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
After working in Washington, D.C., for two years, Andrew Orlebeke (’10) is in graduate school in Seattle, Washington, studying public policy. In addition to public service, he has a passion for traveling and an abiding love of sports.
