Spinning Yarns

I’m having trouble believing how quickly the summer has flown past. Here it is, almost the end of August, 2001. How clearly do I remember, watching the rain run down the plate-glass windows of my third-grade classroom, thinking how far away 2000 was. Try as I might, the furthest forward I could realistically project myself was about 9th grade — and by that I mean, that’s as far as I could stretch my imagination and still have some kind of coherent picture of what my life might be like. And even that felt like an eternity away.

Life is relativistic, in its own way — time passes more quickly as we get older. Summer vacations crawled by at a leisurely, dawdling pace, when I was a child. Now, a month flies by in the blink of an eye, and my schedule is already full of plans for days I could hardly have dreamed of when I was ten. As much as I love what I do, I confess to a certain wistful longing, at times, for the quieter and less frenetic schedule of an earlier August afternoon, perhaps one spent in the humid shade of a blackberry bush, fingertips and lips stained with the bitter-sweet tang of new berries.

Inexorably, the cool promise of fall hangs in the air, a whipcrack of ice poised to spack against the russeting days of October, not so far off, now, as it was in May. The first derivative of lengthening days will peak in less than a month, and the well-trodden footways of this swelling College will again pop with the crisp, new treads of incoming freshmen, arriving as they do with hope in their hearts and apprehension in their steps. As they discover everything for the first time, they will teach the sophomores how it was that everyone could tell when they were freshmen, only a few short months ago. The juniors, scattered to the four winds by wanderlust and maladministration of housing, feel relationships slipping through their fingers and out of their grasp, while each senior quietly shivers at the realization that this truly is their last fall as a child.

After a summer spent in research and work, I’m excited by the prospect of being a teaching assistant again. Happily, I will be privileged to work with Professor Scot Drysdale again, something I’m looking forward to a great deal. We are working to make some improvements in the course we worked together on last year, and I’m excited to see how some of our changes will work out.

Filed by Michael at 12:50 under Personal, Philosophical
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