The Grad School Diaries: Long Day’s Journey Into Night

East Lansing, Michigan, is connected to the Detroit airport by a bus service called the “Michigan Flyer,” which runs between the two locations with stops in Jackson and Ann Arbor several times each day. It’s significantly cheaper than leaving your car in the long-term parking lot in Detroit, and has the added advantage of not having to leave you car somewhere that car thieves know you won’t be coming back to for several days, but it also has the drawback of making you wait until the next flyer departure before you can go home. Which is what I’m doing now; my flight from Los Angeles got in at 8:00 and the next flyer isn’t until 10:30. Even worse, as it turns out, is that all of the food service locations in the Detroit airport shut down at 8:00; by the time I got out onto the concourse there was no chance of getting anything to eat, let alone finding somewhere to camp out and wait for the bus…

Fortunately for me there’s a waiting area (you couldn’t quite dignify it enough to call it a waiting room) just inside the building from the bus stop area, and it’s deserted this time of night. I was able to grab a bench across from the vending machines to throw my bags on, and I’m sitting here munching on stuffers without any aesthetic, social, moral or nutritionally redeeming features and a bottle of pop. It’s possible that the wrappers would be better for you than the food items, but at least they taste good, and they’ll keep me from getting the shakes or having to eat the specialized diabetic food bars in my luggage before I get back to Lansing. And there’s no denying that I could probably use a moment for quiet reflection…

Union Station in Los Angeles was exactly as I remembered it, down to the absurd parking arrangements and the art deco mission-style architecture. Getting my wife and our daughter checked in went smoothly for once; so did my check-in at LAX the following morning. And, in fairness, I have to say that the flight back was no more miserable than such passages normally are. But my awareness of the past few days has mostly been of being vaguely uncomfortable the whole time; the way you feel when you can’t get comfortable sitting down or lying down. Meeting friends in Long Beach for dinner at one of the places we used to go often when we lived nearby; saying goodbye to my father and stepmother and leaving the house I grew up in; sitting around the all-too-familiar terminal at LAX; even the airplane itself have felt vaguely off. Perhaps my discomfort isn’t really physical…

Steinbeck, among others, wrote about a feeling of wellness that one gets when all is right with the world – or as much of it as you are personally responsible for. To the extent that you can have such a feeling in a seldom-used waiting room on the parking level of an airport – or, for that matter, in an airplane, a borrowed car, a beloved place that is no longer your home, or the house that never really was (despite living there 14 years) – I don’t have it now. As an accomplished strategist and better than fair tactician (whatever one might think of my abilities as a strategy scholar, which is a very different thing), I’ve got the self-awareness to know when my knowledge is incomplete and my understanding of the tactical picture is dangerously weak. And at the moment, the only thing I know for sure is that there’s trouble coming, and I can’t stop it…

I don’t know if my wife and I can overcome the alienation that has come between us, and get back to good. I don’t know if the powers that be will let me finish the doctoral program, or if they’ll use any number of things to make my position untenable and try to run me off. I don’t know if I can ever return to the city I still think of as “home,” or if I will get the chance to find a new one, somewhere out there in America. I’m twelve hours into this sixteen-hour trip back to where I live, and eighteen months into the five-year quest to get the letters P, H and D added to the end of my name. Will I find my way back into the light? Is there one more time in the sun for me, and if I can reach it, will I have the sense to stay put this time? Will I get the love of my life back, or will this always be between us? Is this [expletives deleted] bus EVER going to arrive and carry me off into the darkness? As usual, I’ve got no answers; just a cold and lonely journey as a long day passes into night…