University life in all its stages

Time is collapsing all around me.

I am grading first year papers, and as I sometimes do, I dug out one of my papers from first year–from, holy crap, 1992! And I read it. And was transported back into that smart aleck self I was then, all piss and vinegar and not much knowledge at all. It was a paper on “To His Coy Mistress” wherein I expressed surprise that literature could be witty. (Yeah. I was that kid. Let me just apologize to all my teachers …) The paper both sounded like me and did not sound like me … and was in Courier font, because my prof didn’t like computers. When I put the paper down and blinked up at the sunshine in my campus office I was totally discombobulated. The shift from 1992 to 2011 happened in that glance up from the paper. How did this happen to me?

We are hiring a new junior colleague in my field (digital media studies! Please apply!) and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I am not, actually, junior any more. I’ve been here seven and a half years; I got my PhD in 2004. I was imagining that we would be hiring … I don’t know, someone from my cohort? But I won’t even be a generational peer of my new colleague. I’m not the fresh thinking any more; I am one of those who will benefit from the infusion of someone else’s fresh blood into the body of the department. Amazing!

In my digital life writing class, my grad students have all had to produce personal blogs. As I read through those, the lives they articulate are both startlingly familiar and achingly remote. Grad student experiences are eternal and timeless, and while those experiences are part of my experiences, my history, it’s not really my story any more. I’m mostly through my existential crises, my big moves to new cities, my basement apartments and groaning bookshelves whose tomes were assigned to me by others. How did 1998 get so far away from me without my really knowing it? Most of my friends are closer to 50 than they are to 30.

My oldest nephew is in grade 11: his mother and I are taking him back to our alma mater this weekend, for campus day. He spent the first two years of his life on that campus. We’re going to retrace our steps, only this time instead of handing him in his slippery nylon snowsuit back and forth as we try to find a spot to eat that’s not in the smoking section, he’ll be busy fending off the hugs of my five year old daughter while his mother and I can’t stop remarking on the things that have changed, and the things that haven’t. My nephew is full of excitement, amazed to discover that university classes don’t run every day, from 9:00 until 3:00, and that he gets to pick them all himself. That there will be classes with hundreds of people in them. The freedom and the responsibility.

One of my colleagues is retiring. There’s going to be a party, with speeches. His kids have moved away, and he and his wife have sold their big old house with the beautiful gardens and the pocket doors and are renting something, until they figure out what they want to do next. He seems quite happy to be walking away. Amazing.

This is my twentieth year in university. More and more of my life is anchored to these places, these schedules, these routines. Orange and brown decor, brutalist architecture, the rhythms of academic semesters. Meal plans, parking woes, and backpacks. Thousands of 18 year olds, bookshelves everywhere, and hyper-literate conversation. This has all stayed mostly the same, but I guess I’ve been changing all along, right?

This is not a lament, no. I’m happier now and here than, really, I’ve ever been. I guess it’s just that circumstances lately have brought home to me that even if I’m not going anywhere, everything is still moving forward. Amazing.