on first days

Today is the first day of classes at the new university, and I find myself sitting in my office. This office doesn't have a window, not even in the door. But it does have a big desk, and a shiny new computer and printer, and there is even a squishy buffalo and Eames elephant next to my plant, which I lugged from the office in Michigan. I taught a brief class this morning, and then I have hours before the late afternoon classes. Half of my morning students lined up to introduce themselves to me, to shake my hand (it's something they learn in First Year Experience), and I was glad to meet them.

The first week is always strange--there's almost too much time. I wrote to friends this morning: This week I'll kill too much time, and then the semester will eat me alive. Can't I just bottle this shit right now and then open up that bottle in, say, October, when I have sixty essays to grade in a weekend? Or maybe I'll just open that other bottle I always reach for in October--the one labeled BOURBON. I'm teaching the most classes I've ever taught, but I was able to dust off my lessons from last fall and implement them fairly easily, and the other two sections are online. Online is less talking, which makes a surprisingly big difference. I will save my throat and hurt my hands instead.

We have been here for a few weeks--long enough to notice that when the students come back, the town swells. There is a different energy crackling in the air. I think I teach because I love the cycle of fresh starts it affords me. New Year's is usually a let-down in some unexpected way, or it was before I gave up on it and just started hanging out at home, drinking Champagne and playing Scrabble with the B. But when you teach, you get a fresh start in Auguseptember. There are new folders, and the students are excited and rested from the summer, and I think that I will always offer to teach freshman Comp if only because it's my chance to help acclimate these students. Some small chance to make them actual human beings.

Also, I decorated my course web site with these goldfish. COME ON! Who wouldn't dig a big awesome photo of goldfish when they're looking for assignment sheets? JACKASSES, THAT IS WHO.

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I always think of school on these days, but not only undergrad. I think of the outfit I picked out for the first day of fifth grade, a tiered skirt monstrosity in hot pink and black. I think of the first days of middle school, in the suburbs, waiting for the bus in my neighbor's driveway under the cottonwood tree, its leaves already brown and crunchy.

I think of the first days of high school and the goth kids who stood on the strip of lawn between the school and the road before first bell, smoking cigarettes in the brisk air, and the German assistant principal who would stride across the lawn with her walkie-talkie in hand, trying to cajole them to quit. I think about the first week at Fredonia, after my father dropped me off to stand with my garbage cans of belongings, and making those adult-ish decisions for the first time in my life: what time do you want to eat dinner, what will you choose from the steam tables, when will you do your homework. 

I think of the first official weekend of college, when I was lonely and bored and thinking, if briefly, of transferring to UB. And I think of the first day of TA training in Minnesota, sitting in the room across from our bullpen office in my Astroturf flip-flops, and sizing up each person who entered and thinking Could we be friends? 

Later, Jean would tell me that she noticed my shoes right away. Later I would be offered this position at this university by the same man who held that first workshop. Later I would wear those shoes to the new office, the week before classes started, just to remind myself that even in a season of fresh starts and new legal pads, some things don't change.