New Hope Bridge The Delaware River and the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge in December 2021

Before my visit to Chicago, I had only seen Kevin once after we graduated high school. It was last winter, around Christmas. Kevin was visiting and staying with his homestay family from high school in Washington Crossing.

I was visiting my girlfriend in Boston. I decided to see Kevin before he headed back to Chicago, and my girlfriend wanted to visit Philadelphia with a friend of hers, so on December 23, I drove them to the city of brotherly love. We left fairly early, but the traffic on I-95 due to the holiday made the trip longer than usual. I dropped them off at their hotel, just a few blocks due south of the City Hall. The bronze statue of William Penn still stood on top of the white City Hall Tower. The sun was already setting.

I circled the City Hall and drove east. The cold orange December sun shone in my rearview mirror. It was dark when I got to Kevin’s house. I picked him up and we went to my house. We had dinner and talked. He stayed for the night.

The next day we decided to visit our high school in the afternoon. We drove west and crossed the Delaware River, entering New Hope. We then turned right onto the narrow street that ran along the river until we hit Phillips Mill Road, where we turned left. The winding, curvy road took us to our school. We parked the car in the parking lot near the Circle, a roundabout at the end of the driveway leading from Phillips Mill Road to the campus.

“Visitors must sign in at the front desk,” a sign read. We ignored it – we decided we were not visitors and didn’t need to sign in. The school was quiet and deserted. The short school buildings stood where they were, sparsely populating the campus. We walked to the tennis court. Kevin played tennis in high school. Thin white clouds veiled the sun, which was sinking and lethargically radiating the last bits of its warmth.

“The scene reminds me of a poem,” he said as we wandered on the empty court.

“Which one?”

“I don’t know if you have read it before. It’s by Liu Yong,” he said and began to recite the poem. It’s a poem about farewells. I wish I could tell you what the poem is, instead of just telling you what it is about. I looked up the poem on my phone and read it along with him. It reminded me of the times when we read and recited poems together. I remembered how he read “Ode to the West Wind” in the library on yet another cold winter day.

“O Wind, If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

A few days later at home, I looked up the poem by Liu Yong again, and neatly copied it in my notebook.

We walked to the dining hall, where we wrote math equations and solved problems with gel pens on napkins; where we arranged Starbursts to think about permutations; where we put three cups on the table, facing down, and placed a Starburst under one of them to demonstrate the Monty Hall problem. I still don’t know how Tim, the college counselor who sat at the table behind us, found the Starburst every single time.

We walked to the PAC, one of the largest buildings on campus, whose roof looked like the hull of a wooden ship turned upside down. Kevin had his piano concert in the PAC. While enjoying the music among the large audience and applauding for him, I probably also felt a bit envious of his musical talents.

We walked around the PAC, and saw Rick, a math teacher, from afar. We walked towards the pond, where he stood. I thought we would just have a brief chat, but Rick had a lot to say and the conversation lasted much longer than I expected.

We left the school. The sun lingered above the horizon and it was getting darker. We originally planned to have dinner together, but because of the longer-than-expected conversation with Rick, we decided to get coffee instead.

“Do you ever think…” he said as I drove and paused for a few seconds. I grinned, wondering what he was going to say. “…we were secretly competitive in high school?” he finally asked.

I paused for a second. And said no. I lied. At that moment I was still being competitive. I didn’t want to appear petty. He seemed disappointed, perhaps by my dishonesty.

We got coffee from a Starbucks near the river, and walked to the edge of the water. The river was calm and blue, and the sky almost had the same color as the water, only paler. The narrow green steel bridge connecting Pennsylvania and New Jersey stood silently, carrying people home.