I didn’t go to college, but I did once unexpectedly end up at Princeton University’s “reunions weekend.” The way they do it, every 5th year class has their reunion on campus at the same time. So every year, on one weekend, the Princeton campus will be filled with people celebrating their 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on class reunions— all the way up until there’s nobody alive anymore. The beginning of reunions weekend kicks off with a parade! It is a parade of the Princeton graduates: featuring themselves, in honor of themselves, for… themselves. It works like this: all the graduates pack the sidewalks of the parade route, but ordered by graduation year. The recent graduates are standing at the end of the route, and the oldest graduates are at the beginning. Then, the parade begins. The oldest living graduate steps off the sidewalk and leads the parade. When everyone older than you has gone by, you step into the street and become the parade. Until you become part of the parade, you’re cheering the parade. You cheer and witness everyone before you, and then you are cheered and witnessed by everyone after you. It is a bizarre ritual. To see it, though, is like seeing the entire fossil record of Princeton graduates. The person leading the parade — the oldest living graduate in that cohort — is a white guy. And then, for a reallllly lonnnnnng time, it’s just white guys! After 30 minutes… a woman! A white woman. With people in the parade maybe holding signs like “first coed graduating class!” And then another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more white women in the parade. And then… the first black man! Another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more black men. And so on. By the end — the most recent class — is the exact opposite of the beginning. A mix of everyone you can think of. For some reason that parade really stuck with me. It’s simultaneously a representation of how much the world has changed, but also a representation of how many “minutes of parade” are still walking around having lived and ended up where they are under very different circumstances.