Goodbye – Remembering Oldenborg

Note from Gabby Lewis, PO ’26

As we bid farewell to Oldenborg, we know that even though the physical building will disappear, the fleeting images, flavors, and sounds of this place will remain forever etched in the memories of many of us. Despite the physical loss of a dining hall, a residence, a place that brought strangers together and led them to share a meal and converse in a language that, for many, was foreign, what once was will be no more; yet the persistence of memory will keep it close to us for a long time. Oldy will remain alive as a transitional state, a kind of effervescent mental condition constructed from memory, appearing each time it is recalled, not as a definitive farewell occurring in a single instant, but as a slow erosion of connection and presence.

All at once, upon tasting a beef Stroganoff noodle, lightly coated in the warm sauce that permeates the entire dish, we pause, aware that something extraordinary is happening to us. An exquisite pleasure floods our senses, something isolated, detached, with no indication of its origin. And immediately the vicissitudes of life become indifferent to us, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory; this new sensation has upon us the effect that love has of filling us with a precious essence. Or rather, that essence was not in us; it was us. … Where did it come from? What did it mean? How can we grasp and understand it? … And suddenly, the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of lunches eaten on cool early spring days in Claremont, at meals where French was practiced, for English was not permitted at these lunches, when we would greet the residents of Claremont as they made their way to the dining hall, and they too would share the Russian noodles, dipping them into the sauce before tasting them. The sight of those noodles alone would have reminded us of nothing before we tasted them. And all of this because of the sauce from a humble plate of noodles.

Even though the physical comfort of this place, like a mother’s kiss before sleep, is coming to an end, it will remain a cherished memory for all of us. Just as Proust had to learn to grow up and fall asleep without his mother’s kiss, we too must learn to live without Oldy. Yet this place will surely remain engraved within us in a feeling of bittersweet nostalgia whenever we hear the bustle of mixed languages spoken within those same two hundred square feet, whenever we taste Häagen-Dazs ice cream, or whenever we see the functional brutalist style of exposed concrete set against the neighboring Spanish architecture.

Goodbye Oldenborg Title Painting: April 22, 2026