Andy Barrett, this, buddy, is for you.

Homecoming came and went faster than Eric Dickerson this past weekend. I visited with Eric, too, tried to get him to suit up for the game. The guy could still play, although at 50, he’d probably only get 1500 yards this season. After all, he’d only get to play in four games.

I love Homecomings and reunions as much as I love Christmas. At all three I gorge on them like a bear on salmon right before hibernation. Like the bear, I feast on the festivities and then disappear into my cave when the whole thing is over with.

It was good to hear from a dear classmate on Sunday afternoon who professed the same “blueness” once they folded the tents and Saturday, fittingly, gave way to the Sunday morning gray. “I’m not waiting on a lady,” I heard Mick Jagger sing in the distance, “I’m just waiting on a friend.”

I hate the shortness of Homecoming, the compacting of time and energy and the franticness of trying to catch up with this person whom you haven’t seen in 20 years while trying to catch up with this other person you really want to talk to.

I was talking to one Fiji brother on Saturday, turned to greet another, and then looked up and both had vanished, vaporized into another conversation, pulled into another circle of friends by handshakes and hugs, time seemingly frozen while the sunshine, fittingly, beamed golden rays of light on men and women who I have always seen as golden, come rain or shine.

I just said simply, “Dammit, I miss my friends already.” “Yeah, me too,” he said. I wanted to keep my friend on the line for as long as I could, just like I wanted time to stand still on Saturday, which it did for a little while.

I gazed at the surreal sight of a golden fall sunshine beaming streams of rays through those now-grown oak trees on all those golden friends of mine, golden through years of rain or shine. Those friends, like those oaks, were solid and tall and proud as we hugged and conversed and laughed beneath them.

I want to do it again. This week.

In an attempt to become SMU’s oldest freshman, I wasn’t content with just the tailgates and the football game. Afterward, I helped close down the Barley House with some new SMU friends, various students who I met while taking my stepson and his buddies out on the town. I’m the oldest man to go on Spring Break, too.

Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. Fort Worth’s fine but it ain’t home, the Hilltop’s home but it ain’t mine no more. Once a year, though, it’s all of ours.

Rick Larson, the Alumni Guy, is a 1981 graduate of SMU as well as a member Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He has been a stockbroker/investment banker for 26 years. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]