The Grad School Diaries: The River of Time

I zipped up my jacket and pulled my knit cap down over my ears as I walked out the east entrance of the Business Complex and set off down the path. It’s fall in East Lansing, and the cold wind has gone from crisp to bitterly cold, but I’ve got to get to class, and there’s no other feasible way of getting where I’m going. I pull on my Thinsulate ™ gloves and feel grateful for both my gore-tex boots and my cold-climate heritage…

I’m taking an undergraduate statistics class this semester, because unless I can master this subject at the elementary level I’ll never be able to cope with it at a graduate level. And since at least half of my doctoral classes are, effectively, classes that use statistics at a graduate level, this class is going to be important to me for the rest of the journey, even if it is an undergraduate class filled with kids of half my age or less. I really don’t think of it as slumming; it’s more remedial than anything else, and if I’m really lucky then maybe the undergraduates won’t be offended by having me in their class…

The walk from the Business Complex to Wells Hall (home of the Math and Statistics departments) is less than a mile’s distance along the banks of the Red Cedar River, but it’s a world of difference; from seminar classes in state-of-the-art classrooms and interactions with fellow scholars who have also chosen academia as a career (lifers, if you will) as we discuss the cutting edge of research in the field, to a well-worn building and an ordinary math-based staple course you could take almost anywhere. It’s also a voyage back in time, to days when I walked along a similar path near the water’s edge and wondered if there really was a life beyond that one, and if I could really put aside the errors of my callow youth and be accepted there. To change, to grow, to become more than I was…

Today, as I walked past the Farm Lane Bridge on one side and the International Center on the other, there was a loud honking noise from overhead, and a dozen Canada geese swooped down and alighted on the water. It was completely unexpected, and I found myself laughing with delight. I’ve always loved the geese; I find them endlessly amusing, although I suppose there’s really nothing inherently funny about a wild goose (other than the name). It’s just a large, black-and-white water bird, but I have always loved them for their waddling gait, their outrageous honking vocalizations, their endearing social habits, and their custom of mating for life. In an instant, I was transported back to the days in Santa Barbara, watching the ducks, pelicans and dozens of migratory birds on the lagoon next to our dorm. The years have gone by, time has come full circle, and I find myself here once again, in a place I know strangely well, for all that I’m still a newcomer here…

I’ve suffered less from mid-life crisis than many people I’ve known – unless this whole adventure is just one big crisis, of course. Sometimes I think it’s because I don’t think of myself as middle-aged, despite my 44 years and corresponding grey hair and wrinkles. But mostly, I think, it’s because my “inner child” never really went away; 40 years later, I’m still the child who loved feeding the ducks in Venice; 25 years later, I’m still the young man who loved watching the wild birds (and feeding the ducks) at UCSB’s wildlife preserve. I jest about not having an inner child, so much as I do an “outer grown-up.” But perhaps, like all of the best jokes, there’s a grain of truth in this one…

People sometimes speak of time as being fluid, like a river, with currents and eddies, that takes us from the headwaters of our birth to the great Ocean that awaits us all. Billy Joel used exactly that metaphor in the song “River of Dreams,” and Harlan Ellison used it in a more direct sense in “City on the Edge of Forever.” I’m still trying to learn what I don’t know, and that’s more true on days like today when I’m trying to keep up with the 19-year-olds in Wells Hall than most of the times of my life and most of the places I have been in my travels. But just the same, it occurs to me that sometimes the River of Time may not be just an abstract concept that we use to give a more poetic feeling to our fear of the unknown. Sometimes you can find it running past the east entrance of the building in which you spend most of your days…