Last year I made the Gonzaga smoker for the first time, after years of missing it, finding excuses not to go and flat-out not showing up. Had a great night. This year I went back with no resistance. Terrific to see Court, Marc, Tom, Jonny, Jeff, and Tim from the class of '98, as well as Tim, James, my brother, and lots of folks from other years. Go Eagles.

Had a nice lunch with my parents yesterday and picked up some mail. Among the pieces was the latest issue of the Gonzaga alum magazine, The Good News. The pages were filled with memories of former school president Fr. Novotny, whose unexpected death I've mentioned here.

Of the remembrances, maybe my favorite came from a reprinting of the obituary in the Aquilian, Gonzaga's student paper and my home-within-a-home years ago. If you ever worked for your high school newspaper, or even your college one, you had to enjoy this early paragraph:

He helped found a freshman newspaper called "Frosh," and by his senior year he was writing for the Loyola Blakefield school paper. As a student, he was not afraid to share his keen sense of humor with others, and this was evident in his authorship of a student newspaper article entitled, "It's About Time Someone Criticized Unfair Criticisms."

If you've ever seen the T-shirts piled in my dresser, this one's for you.

From the Post this fall, a story about a senior at Gonzaga who attends football games. He's a fan, not a player. Which is exactly the point.

For diehard Gonzaga students, Saturday can be anything but relaxing. By choice. Saturday is football day for the Eagles. For the players on the team, this is what the team has been building up for all week. The adrenaline is pumping. Even when they are standing still, they are moving. Clapping hands, high-fiving teammates along the sidelines. You can feel the energy as the team anxiously waits to take the field.

Off the field, but less than a first down away from the team, the energy is just as amped. They aren't wearing uniforms, but they've risen early and dressed for the game.

McAuliffe slept in an extra hour, rising at 7:45 a.m., to meet some classmates for breakfast before heading downtown for the game. His purple Gonzaga shirts – more than a dozen – have their own special space in the closet. "I just reached in a grabbed the one on top," McAuliffe said.

My worn tees may only be for bed now. But they're still in the dresser.

The story gave me a nice kick of alum pride and so did the video below. I want to time-travel back to 1996 and show it to 17-year-old Patrick in his HTML class. It would blow his mind that Web videos were going to be more than The Spirit of Christmas.  And that they didn't need days of downloading. And that anyone could shoot, edit, add special effects and post them to the Internet. Anyone at all, even kids on Eye Street.

Gonzaga lost the game mentioned, but the video displayed how the school has moved forward in all kinds of ways. After Fr. Novotny, the school president since my freshman year, died unexpectedly this fall, the football team wore memorial armbands. Though there may be no armbands for video editors, Novotny's leadership stretched across all kinds of academics, athletics and activities. Made the video possible.

One thing prompting me to post today was realizing this week that a few NPR colleagues also grew up in the area. The second prompt was friend Steve e-mailing about being in the school store recently. He'd married into an Eye Street family and was buying Christmas presents for a relation. He asked I'd gone to NU to keep wearing the Gonzaga purple. (The school store is something.) I couldn't totally disagree. A third was e-mailing with old classmates about catching a movie over New Year's. A fourth was seeing my alum uncle at the tree-cutting.

The fifth and final prompt came in catching up with mail this afternoon. In the stack was the most recent mailing from Gonzaga. Printed before Novotny's death, the mailing included a letter from him. It opened:

No matter how far I may wander from Eye Street, Gonzaga is never far from my thoughts. This is not just the consequence of devotion to responsibility, either noble or compulsive, that any of us face when away from work, especially in this age of instant and constant communication. It is, though, the result of something perhaps even more familiar.

We've probably all experienced the almost reflexive flash of recognition whenever we catch sight of something purple…

If there was a book just about debunking Gonzaga rumors, I'd buy it in a second. Or we need a Snopes. In "John Kelly's Washington" today:

Tim Fitzmaurice wrote to say: "As all good alums of Gonzaga College High School on North Capitol and Eye know, part of Tiber Creek runs underneath its old gym. In fact there is a hatch/manhole in the old gym that supposedly goes right down to the creek."

Thomas Clifford, the rector of the Jesuit community at Gonzaga (and a historian), poured cold water on that notion. Although the old gym has been known to flood — and there is a sump pump underneath — the main course of the Tiber was well to the east of the school.

Ed was a good friend at Gonzaga, and it was great to catch up at his Artomatic wall. We hadn't seen each other since graduation 11 years ago, so of course it was like hardly a week had passed. Met his cool wife, caught up with other Johnstons, planned to get together again.

Beyond Gonzaga-ness, Ed's art was also well worth seeing. It was one of the few showings to combine industrial design with other art forms, moving from photos to drawings to computer modeling to fabrication. 

You can find Ed's space on the fourth floor, and his website's here. On the site, Ed explains his artwork: "Human experience in contemporary society can be constantly recorded and measured using technology. Every action can be analyzed according to various conventions and webs of surveillance. Where in this scrutinized space-time might we construct personal space-times? … These simultaneously virtual and physical objects stand as metaphorical pathways through the chaos of places, thoughts and memories that are experienced each day."

A Gonzaga mom remembers a neighborhood fourth-grader killed along with his brother and mother this month. In today's Washington Post:

Do you think that could possibly be our Dakota on Page C6? No, the photo didn't look like him, I said. But Joanne Gaughan said she thought it was, and she thought his last name might be Peters. Catie Malone said she just hoped I was right about the photo. I knew I would not be able to sleep unless I found out for sure. So I logged onto a news Web site and there was a much better, clearer, color photo: our Dakota.

A little older than we used to be: Before Monday Night Football, before PTI, before the Chat House, we used the pay phone that used to be here outside the gym to try and get on Tony Kornheiser's radio show. We never made it on the air. He hung up on kids. When we weren't calling WTEM, we were voting for the purple M&M color. Stupid blue. 

Friends asked this last week if the high school reunion was going to be a big deal, with dinners, photos, games and some Grosse Point-like dance. I told them it was more likely to be watching football and then drinking beer in the cafeteria. Which it was, and it was great.

The day was beautiful, the first real jacket one of the fall, and we got a touchdown in the last minute of football game. The previous minutes had been 35-0 by hated DeMatha in a rebuilding year for us, but the late score was enough of a win. We went exploring the school next.

The renovations and new construction had begun in earnest the week after our graduation. They hadn't really stopped since, and while I'd seen them briefly before, it was different walking though the new halls with classmates, piecing together the collective memory. Things were wider, nicer, could be imagined with cellphones or iPods bobbing by them, and made more sense. But there was still some of the old feel. The porch area with no doors to it? The lit case packed with Simpsons stuff? Not pictured: The second case filled exactly the same way.

And my pictures ended there. I've learned that about myself in the last year: I always remember I have a cellphone. But when the moment's about friends more than sights, I never remember I have a camera. We got name tags and mugs. We talked life, Gonzaga and even some Blessed Sacrament for hours in the cafeteria. The beer was delicious.

The NBC show compliments my high school and yet still fails to compliment it enough. Eye Street Headlines has the details. Mrs. Landingham, get me the Navy!

Jamil Ludd, the first Muslim student body president at my alma mater, is heading off to Tufts after an amazing career at Gonzaga. Read all about it in today's Washington Post.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor talked to students at my high school yesterday. (No text available; only video.)