Back to School
Today Beatrice, Arthur, and William went back to school, to grades 8, 6, and 3, respectively. I went back to school, too. Though my classes at Claremont don’t start until the end of the month, this week I’m taking a summer course in English Paleography at UCLA’s California Rare Book School. The class runs every day 8am-5pm, followed by a full schedule of evening lectures, receptions, and mixers, so Zac suggested I stay in Westwood for the week rather than commute back and forth from Pasadena every day. (Zac is also taking the week off work so I can attend the class.) And so I find myself, at the age of 43, staying in the UCLA Summer Hostel for Students, which is theoretically open to university-affiliated people of all kinds but absolutely intended for undergraduates.
I am staying in a four-person suite with a shared bathroom and communal living space, and I take my meals in the student dining hall across the street. For $108 a night I get three meals a day; a thin, scratchy bath towel; and a full set of sturdy dorm room furniture: a desk, dresser, book shelf, and loft bed, each labeled #1 to distinguish them from the desks, dressers, book shelves, and loft beds of my roommates. So far no one has checked into the suite except me, though, so I’m free to rattle around the empty dorm room alone, doing homework, taking video calls from Margaret and Thomas, and snacking on the vegan jerky I bought at the student store.
I’m so happy to be here I could cry. Not here, the UCLA Summer Hostel for Students, though I do love a good dining hall, and not even the class on English Paleography, though it’s excellent so far. I’m so happy to be here, in academia, in all of it, happy and relieved, too, as though I’ve finally corrected a journey that went off course a long time ago.
My junior year in high school we all wrote about our career goals and then we each got to shadow a professional with that career in the community. I said I wanted to be a professor. I believe I specified “English professor” but I guess no English professors volunteered because I was assigned to a physics professor at USC. He was a thin, soft-spoken man wearing an over-washed button-down shirt, khakis, and tennis shoes, carrying around a half cup of cold coffee in a paper cup. On job shadowing day, he kindly let me follow him through his workday, as he taught a (totally incomprehensible, to me) college-level physics class and then attended a faculty meeting and brown bag lunch. He brought his lunch in a literal brown bag, a limp sandwich and a bag of chips. I sat beside him as he chewed his sandwich and the department head read from a list of announcements about staff changes and parking passes and the whole time I was just absolutely glowing. “This,” I thought to myself, “this is the life of the mind!”
Then I went to college, and it wasn’t always good or easy, and I wasn’t always happy, but even beset by constant financial problems and the many dramas of young adulthood, I knew I was doing work I believed in. After I left the University of Chicago, I couldn’t bear to visit the campus, it made my heart ache. For twenty years after I graduated, I wanted to go back, or come home, to finish the work I had barely begun.
Last winter I had a morning class on literary theory. We met outside because of COVID and it was absolutely freezing. Students brought Thermoses and camp blankets to class, my professor brought in extra coats, and all of us sat around a folding table slogging through Lukács, dressed like a tragically under-equipped Boy Scout troop. We never had a single dry erase marker that worked in 14 weeks. And the whole time I sat there, teeth chattering, thinking, “I am so lucky to be here.”
I don’t talk about grad school very often because frankly I’m a little embarrassed about the whole thing. Let me just say: I know. I’ve heard. (Please don’t reply to this, honestly, I really do know.) Leaving publishing for academia is like jumping off the Lusitania to land on the Titanic. But what can I say? This is the ship I’m going down with. I am under no illusions that I’m going to get a tenure track job or any job at all. At this point grad school is basically an expensive hobby, and every time I say I’m getting a PhD in medieval literature, I feel like I’m announcing I’ve bought a small private plane. I know, too, what a gift it is to be able to do something like this at all, and to be supported, financially and otherwise, by so many people. God knows I’ll never be able to pay it back so all I can offer is my gratitude.
I’m going to go back to reading manuscripts now. Today I learned how to date a manuscript by the shape of a lowercase g. Tomorrow’s a big day, too, the dining hall is serving pancakes.
What I Should Be Doing
Studying for my Latin exams, getting ready for my new job at Glendale Community College, preparing this week’s paleography class presentation
What I’m Actually Doing
Teaching kids about tall ships; removing every knob, hinge, and handle in my house (and, with luck, someday putting them all back); getting a new tattoo; preparing for the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte
Also I'm Very Excited About
Loafers are back (for some of us, loafers never left).
The Fine Print
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