You Must Remember This
For the past decade or so, a few students have maintained--and unsystematically added to--a list of practices, places, people, habits, coinages, and daily doings that will strike a chord with recent alumni. The items are not traditions per se, but they're similar in that they belong to shared experience, instantly recognized and remembered as distinctive parts of living in Gambier.
The list is called, bizarrely, the Kenyon Cheese Compendium. Our sources say that it was originally published by Greg Hannahs '97 and the Secret Underground Cheese Kids (we don't understand, either), then passed along in the manner of a sacred text, or at least a running joke. Our copy has well over 300 items. Here are just a few:
- Spelling words with "K" or "Ph," as in "Kamp Kenyon" or "Philander's Phun Phebruary Phling"
- Not stepping on the seal in the entry hall of Peirce
- Kenyon cornstalk T-shirts
- Calling Columbus (Ohio) "C-Town"
- Extendo
- Going to the cemetery to write poetry
- Posing as the Renaissance statue in front of the Renaissance statue
- Open hours at the observatory
- The "must use tongs" sign on the bagel case in the bookstore
- Making out in the train by the Kokosing Gap Trail
- Making out at Sunset Point
- Making out in the library (oh, come on, you know you have at least once)
- Calling Mount Vernon "the Vern"
- Getting lost in Mather or McBride
- Sledding down the Ernst hill on lunch trays
- The yellow package slips in the post office
- The Christmas lights on Middle Path in winter
- The "dork bell" in the library (if you're not there late enough to hear it, you're not a true nerd)
- Trying to catch a bat in your room
- Feeling like you're not connected to the outside world
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