Brownian Motion
In life things happen. Childhood ends. It happened more or less to me, and most of the people I knew. And now, most distressingly, it has happened to my niece who has gone off to college. Nicole; I've know her since she was born, the day after to be precise. My sister Ann's oldest child. I've seen her almost every week or weekend since then, these last eighteen years. She is in the very top ring of my favorite people. I remember her as a self possessed little girl sitting in a tree in the back yard of the Chincoteague beach house. I recall reading Magic School-bus books to her, reading them in her requisite thorough manner, not just the word balloons, but all the accompanying text. All the words and everything it all meant. I remember her as a "Piccadilly Pip-squeak" in a Washington Revels presentation of "A Dickens Christmas." I remember middle school moments those tween to teen years when you first get a locker in school. It brought me back to days when you join the familiar yards and streets in your neighborhood, to all the continents and oceans of the world. Not just as places in pages, but a suddenly vast and very material world. In that same moments I could briefly see the world again through such eyes. I saw less and knew less of her the last few years of high-school. The busy Nicole years. On the other hand I can still recall those years fairly well from my own life, and could sketch in a reasonable impression of it. Her last year of high school the most lasting impression I have of her was in a Glee-inflected staging of Shakespeare's "A midsummer nights dream" by the Wilson players of Wilson Senior High in DC. as "Titania, Queen of the Fairies." Now she's leaving home. Gone to keep an appointment made with a man from the motor trade. What Nicole's leaving represents is the end of a certain type of family togetherness. The end of the possibilities to certain types of experiences. The meta experiences of childhood. A break-point in life when your direct influence in their development is at an end. Of course, for her it is the beginning of everything! The moment where she takes possession of her independence and her own being. Still I'm feeling the departure for myself, and feeling empathy with my sister.
There was difference between this week and last week in how I felt and perceived all this. I work at a university, the university where I almost completed a degree (114 useless credits accumulated) once. Last week, the week before labor day, with all the parents and incoming freshman milling about. I could see my niece Nicole in every one one of them. I could only think of how I would miss her. Perhaps because I could read the family relationships and strains of separation, the letting go in every glance, pause, and overheard comment between those children and their parents. I habitually feel a little diffident at this time of year anyway -- the dread specter of seven credits. It was easy to feel overly conscious.
This week registration opens, classes start. The parents are gone and it is just the students. Graduate students, a peculiar tribe: thin fuzzy different. Impatient. The returning student - a dozen different looks all converging on a hunger of sorts. The freshmen are the ones who stand out. Well mostly they just stand about, looking wide-eyed lost and happy.
Brown University, that's where she is. It's up in Providence. I wiki'd it, Brown University - Wikipedia. and google mapped at it, Brown University Providence RI - Google Maps. I did the same thing last year when she went on a DC school sponsored trip to Paraguay. Its how I keep up. Looking over Brown, a real university, I had a minor, tardy but genuine epiphany that Maryland, at least my Maryland was not where I ever really needed to be. No, I wasn't heading to the Ivy league out of the Navy, but there were smaller-scaled places than a state university and I knew it.
I never liked college much. Never as much as I thought I was going to. This was a mystery and a disappointment to me. Still UMCP always seemed the best of all possible places. Too late a skepticism about college formed, of a romanticism of college life, a romanticism of education. I tossed aside at the outset hard won lessons from four years in the Navy on how tricky in is to live inside a large impersonal institution and still have an individual purpose and direction. Without wanting to create the wrong impression I wish I had been more aggressive about college, about learning, less arrogant about what I knew, which was very very little, less in denial about that. Less attentive to distraction like the radio station or $4/hr dining hall jobs. It isn't about money not made, a practical education. I was a government and politics major; practicality never entered into it. It is about getting to a place where you can effect a difference. Have an opinion that matters, that you can trust because you know how a process works and can communicate that to others. There is something more I should say in recognition that today's college students are not just younger editions of myself, to which I can apply an updating of my experiences and world view. They are not simply a generational splice or increment but an entirely new generation. There were Dj's I listened to from the college station here at U. Maryland a few years back, before I switched over to listening to WFMU primarily. I found myself seeing these DJ's as types and markers of prevailing zeitgeists and of stations in life. The DJ who has broken out of the pop music (including indie pop) wadding pool and seen the immense world of music beyond. Dj's whose tastes and knowledge were cool for high school but never developed further on any day after. Dj's whose playlists included oddly large amounts of video game music, in all its 8-bit polyphonic splendor, because that's what they grew up with. Pong didn't really have theme music. A Dj named Mai Nguyen doing her last radio show as she graduated and headed out to the twenty-something working world. In these I learned that times and outlooks had changed. What any college is, is the teachers, not football, or buildings brick or ivy covered. Anciently sedate as they may be. It is not about all-night studying, nailing deadlines, and developing networks, because you can reproduce all that elsewhere. It is about teachers and dialogues; with the living and present, the distant and removed. It is briefly about the ideas of things. And you can't really do that anywhere else.
11:01:10 PM  ;;
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