(Note to readers: This is a reposting, with edits and imbedded video.)

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 to become a schoolteacher.

"How did I become 46?" I say with protest.

"I know," she said, laughing.

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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.

 

The installation explored the vastness of the universe, the minuteness of its parts and all connections in between. After crawling inside of it, the cares and concerns of that which is outside dissolved, and time and reality were reshaped.

 

The installation signified the end of my journalism career. My write-up on it 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 Sunshine Underground," and it came to mean new beginnings.

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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.
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One morning a few weeks later, on my way to class, I run into an old colleague from the paper. On this morning, he was a guest speaker in a communications class.

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 territory. 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, playing The Chemical Brothers CD.

 

Four classes make Wednesdays burdensome, but on my way to the last one the thought occurs: This doesn't feel surreal anymore.

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.