By Steve Arney
I am trying to be inconspicuous as I glance toward a young lady in my English class.
She is tiny and cute and beautiful. She looks really smart, and I bet she's funny once you get to know her. Maybe she is 20.
I remember thinking: I wish I had a daughter -- and one as cool as this kid.
Later that day, the first day of my return to college, I call my buddy Mary, a fellow laid-off journalist who helped inspire me to return to college and become a schoolteacher.
"How did I become 46?" I say with protest.
"I know," she said, laughing.
"I see these students and I want to meet their mothers."
---
All day, I am living a recurring dream -- everything a surreal swirl. I take notes in class, but other than that it barely seems like I am there.
At 9:45 a.m., I had emerged from my house in time to see the city bus, about two blocks away, streaming toward its destination without me.
It produced one of those sinking feelings so familiar to me in my dreams: I am back in college and something is wrong. I can’t find my class. I can’t get to it. I’ve forgotten I’ve taken it. I am living in a dorm, and I can’t find my room. I am drunk. I have a final and I didn't study.
Having missed my bus in real life, I jump in my car and pop in the The Chemical Brothers CD with the song “The Sunshine Underground.” The song has been a life theme since it was incorporated into an art installation by the same name at the campus art gallery last summer.
It signified the end of my journalism career. My write-up on the installation was the last major spread I did for the newspaper before I was laid off on July 1. But after that, I kept going back to the installation. "The Sunshine Underground" came to mean new beginnings.
(http://www.voortrek.com/krvw/sunshineunderground/index.html)
I wait in line at a pay lot at Illinois State University; I nearly run out of gas. I am late and unsure of my class location, even though I have looked it up at least six times.
But I have arrived. The Chemical Brothers' song is pulsating in my Honda, reminding me that this is real. I am a college student, age 46, studying to become a teacher.
We talk about how things are at the paper. Pay freezes, the defeat of the union drive, suspended 401k contributions, mandatory unpaid furloughs. I don't miss being there. And this is what the conversation means to me: It feels like he was on my turf. He is a visitor; I am not.
That day in class, the professor mentions that he wakes up at 4 in the morning, every day, by choice. "Weirdo," I say under my breath. My neighbor gives a nod. "I went to sleep at 2." Another knowing nod. I kinda fit.
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Favorite thing I've learned: After Cherokee men abandoned the fur trade, they tried "raising" livestock. (Cherokee women farmed.) The men would buy livestock and turn them loose.
When they needed meat, they'd get out their guns and hunt their livestock. Hunting cattle in the forest.
(Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.)
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Last night I worked on my friend's mayoral campaign. Then I did homework until 1:30 a.m. today. Slept until 7.
I hurry to uptown Normal for an open house. My congresswoman has opened an office.
The place is packed and I know most in the room: Sources from my newspaper days, labor leaders from my Newspaper Guild organizing days, McLean County Democrats from my new political activism days and a handful of fellow College Democrats from my new Illinois State University days.
I thank U.S. Rep. Debbie Halvorson for voting for the stimulus package. Then to campus. Four classes make Wednesdays burdensome.
On the way to my last class the thought occurs: This doesn't feel surreal anymore. And I don't want to work for newspapers ever again.
I go home and take a five-hour nap -- from 5 to 10. Wake up and make coffee.
Finish the blog I started a month ago, with the Sunshine Underground playing in the backdrop of my laptop; everyone has laptops now. Still time for a couple hours of homework.
It feels strangely normal.
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Comments
I'm really glad my daughter is out of college....
True story: when I was about 12, I casually said to my mother (a second grade public school teacher) that I'd like to teach high school history when I grew up.
She said if I did that, she'd disown me. She was kidding. I didn't know that. Later she deeply regretted saying that, telling me she thought I would have made a great teacher.
Teaching has always been a back burner dream for me (like opening a used bookstore which, perhaps, should have stayed on the back burner). The thing is, the more teachers I meet here locally, the more I wonder if the aggravation from students, parents (and bond levies) and especially the administration, is worth it.
I'm 46 like you. Maybe you have more fire in you and I've crashed and burned too many times to have much desire to launch into another career at this age. I have been kicking around the idea of going to the local community college to get a down and dirty certification in something like medical coding - something that a job would or should quickly follow. Yeah, I'd probably hate it, but steady income + health insurance has taken a baseball bat to whatever pride I used to have.
Well if don't get a job offer by March 15, I will move my bookstore on to the Square and try to make the best of it. In for a penny. . .
Great to see B/N still has a pretty jumping cultural life around the universities. I miss covering ISU and IWU. Although I'd have to say, in retrospect, the most fun part of the Journal-Star job was hanging out with you at the L&J covering murder trials. I don't think I ever adequately thanked you for the guidance and assistance you gave me in getting acclimated to the way that place worked. So consider this a belated yet sincere thank you.
BTW, the parent company of the first daily I ever worked for, the Willoughby News-Herald, (Journal-Register Co.) just filed for Chapter 11.
So it goes.
No not at all. It's hard to explain but numero uno without a doubt was the circus of the Karl Uban trial. We had everything but Geraldo.
Go Steve!