Chapter1

When he turned forty in 1988, Brian Sparks began running. By 1990, he had run two marathons. When he turned fifty, he added strength training to his regimen. He did it because he refused to give in to middleage.

Brian was a baby boomer. A quintessential baby boomer, born late in 1947, the most representative year for baby boomers. So here he was in the spring of 1998, having turned fifty a few months earlier, and he was running. He wasn’t a fast runner. Too big for that at 6’3” and two hundred pounds. But he was a hard runner with endurance. He was pretty good at every sport he ever tried and he had tried nearly all of them. He was more than pretty good at several sports, including baseball, tennis, andvolleyball.

He was in great physical shape and with his dark medium-length hair and dark mustache, he was an attractive man, who looked much younger than hisage.

On this day, Friday, March 6, he was finishing a five-mile run on the gut-wrenching hills of Indiana University. He was in Bloomington for four days of training for his job as a director of a social service agency. Tomorrow, Saturday, would just be half a day and he would be finished with his training. He had to attend these training sessions periodically and he loved being in Bloomington, where he had spent four of the happiest years of his life as an undergraduate. But he didn’t like sleeping in a strange bed alone. He missed his wife, Beth, and his ten-year-old daughter,Wendy.

Bloomington always brought back wonderful memories. Brian was a nostalgic man who believed that the best time in the history of the world was when he was growing up. And no other years could have been as meaningful or as much fun as the years he attended college, 1965 to1970.

Being in Bloomington made him feel good and also nostalgic. But it also slapped him in the face with the awful truth that you can’t go home again. Once he had been part of the pulse of this wonderful campus, but now he was just avisitor.

Brian finished his run in the parking lot of his hotel, the Holiday Inn, and took the steps up to his room on the second floor. He showered and dressed and then lay down on his bed to try to figure out how he was going to occupy himself for theevening.

He finally decided to walk back to campus. He left his room, went down the stairs and out the side entrance. In a few minutes, he was making his way up Indiana Avenue. He crossed over at Seventh Street and entered the womb. That was how the university felt to him when he was a student there. A womb, insulated and safe from the real world, during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It was good then to be a collegestudent.

It was dusk as he strolled around the campus. The thought occurred to him that although a lot of things had changed, many things were still the same as they were when he was a student here. The campus had grown, expanded, and there were several new buildings. But the core was still thesame.

The Indiana Memorial Student Union was the largest student un