Giving Duke a hand

I think I can trace my entire college career through hands.

First came the handshakes-hundreds of handshakes with people who either became our best friends, or whose names we forgot or maybe never quite caught. Then came the manual labor of pitching tents and aiming ping-pong balls while our fingers froze, but it was worth it because our hands learned the moves: up then down and whoosh for a free throw, 'Z' for Zoubek, 'O' during the national anthem.

Then we adjusted for a year, or two, or four, and sometimes existing on campus was like learning to read Braille-strange and difficult, hard on the hands. Still, they play a significant role in my memory. I remember shaking hands with a future friend and editor the first day I walked into the Chronicle office, not knowing then that I would spend more time under that slanted roof than anywhere else on campus. Her hands were cold and long, her fingers cased in silver rings. I remember the first time I shook President Brodhead's hand in his office. My hand was clammy and nerve-ridden; his was smooth and smaller than I expected. Duke has allowed me to shake hands with Dave Eggers, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Robert Pinsky, Barack Obama, to be influenced by them.

For a while, my hands defined my life as I spent 40 hours a week in 301 Flowers, dialing and typing late into the night to make this paper. And when the lacrosse story broke, perhaps we all wrung our hands at first, but eventually we interlaced our fingers as a University and played a tough and remarkable game of Red Rover against a flawed judicial system.

My hands once poured wine into a bucket to make sangria, and we dragged it into the gardens, played croquet by moonlight and jumped in one of the ponds. Later, I drove to a farmhouse in Virginia with two friends, and we lay on a dock in the middle of the moonless night, the stars above the same as the stars reflected below us in the river, as if we were lying on a mirror. We pointed our fingers at constellations in the sky or in the water and discussed how Duke had or hadn't changed us. We wondered if our prospective life trajectories could possibly be right.

Over the years, my hands have learned to get bartenders' attention, to fit nicely into friends' hands, to hold onto playground swings where we'd all stop on the way back from Main Street, where we'd dig our toes into the sand and talk. Hands and hearts go hand in hand.

I got my palm read last year on the corner of I-40 and 15-501, sort of for fun, sort of to see if I was doing things right in my life. After the psychic studied my lifeline, heartline, headline for some time, she simply said I would help people and that I'd already met the man I would marry. She asked questions about my family and about my interests and offered to read my cards-and reveal more-if I paid double. I said no thanks but left wondering about my future and about my past and their strange and fleeting intersection that must have been Duke.

Coming here four years ago, I felt like I'd been transported Somewhere Else with a pat on the head and no direction-childhood was over and college was to be the formative intermission. I was supposed to claw myself out of a cocoon here and emerge with a Real Life in hand and four years of incredible experiences. I am, for the most part, emerging with both of those, but I still sometimes wonder whether everything happened the way it was Supposed To. I've made lifelong friends here and had an undeniably thrilling time, but for a long time I dwelled on all the missed steps that might have made a difference in who I am. But in a few days we'll all be gripping each others' hands, mashing our lifelines together and screaming lyrics like How's it gonna be, when you don't know me anymore?, and realizing that maybe it doesn't matter if it's the way it was Supposed To Be or not because here we are and it is wonderful. It doesn't matter whether what's happening matches what's allegedly encoded in the lines on our palms, but it took me a while to figure that out.