New guy on campus

April 3, 2009

It felt pretty good this morning, parking the car on Columbus Avenue and strolling through the rain onto the campus of D’Youville College, knowing that I was to become part of it. I looked down Niagara Street into downtown Buffalo and the business district and thought I won’t miss being part of that scene for the next year or so.

I had to go into the undergraduate dormitory to get to the Health Office for a meningitis waiver and passed bleary-eyed students heading out to their 9 a.m. classes. I made my way to advisement where I got me list of courses to begin my master’s degree. I felt definite exhilaration working with the advisor to get my class schedule set up and devised an ambitious plan to complete my degree in one calendar year.

I’m ready to rock ‘n’ roll - whatever it takes, I will do.

My initial feeling is that this is going to be a lot of hard work, an intense year, but a lot of fun. I can feel the synapses in my brain firing again after years of boredom and inactivity. It’s pretty amazing how we get into ruts and never know it.

Cleaning out some files at the end of the day, I had to laugh because I’d been looking for another job for years. There were resumes, cover letters and “notes to self” spanning 15 years. I knew I wasn’t especially thrilled with my employment at the newspaper, but I never knew it went back so far in my career there. Brain. Dead.

So it was with enthusiasm that I mixed with the young students, watching as they studied, delivered papers under professors’ doors and sat in groups chatting. This is my new world – the world of academia. It seemed oddly calm and civilized. Nobody has had big sniff of the almighty dollar yet, so they’re not half-crazed. Hopefully, they will be able to keep their heads in the right place, unlike the Boomer generation, of which I am a part, which has really turned out to be largely – in the words of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson – a generation of swine.

I definitely sensed a spirit of renewal as I marched around the small, urban campus where, coincidentally my wife and mentor also works. Tee-hee! Who knows, maybe I’ll end up with a job at D’Youville also.