The Grad School Diaries: Return to Southbay

There’s a strange sense of déjà-vu as I walk to the end of the pier and stare off into the distance, at the sweep of the coastline and the great city beyond. It has been barely two months since a recurring dream about this place made me realize how much I miss it – and then made me question my fragile sanity, as the visions would not leave me alone. But this isn’t how I wanted to come back to the Southbay. Tops on my list would have been completing the doctorate and getting my dream job somehow within driving distance of this place (a good trick, since none of the universities within that radius is likely to want me); a near second would be winning the lottery and retiring to these shores to write my little stories, never caring if they would sell or not. Failing those outcomes, I would have wished for a job somewhere reasonably close by, with enough time off and enough pay to make regular visits to our old haunts feasible, and a retirement plan generous enough to make our permanent return possible in a couple of decades. Instead, what I’ve got is more of an intermission between the acts of an ongoing drama…

After more than a week in the High Desert, time has caught up with us and we are preparing to leave California for the return to East Lansing. My wife isn’t ready to handle a six-hour transition back to our regular lives, so she and our daughter will be taking the train from LA to Chicago, staying overnight, and then catching the train to Lansing. I’ll fly home a day later, but arrive a day before they do; trading comfort for speed and time to decompress for time to prepare for my classes this coming week. I could go on the train trip – and I would, if I thought it would help; – but perhaps the time together (and without any other parts of the world intruding) will do her more good. Still, there is an odd sense of déjà-vu about that as well…

The last time my wife and our daughter took off on a train trip together was August of 2004; our daughter was leaving for college and my wife decided that the two of them would travel by train from Los Angeles to Atlanta, since this would be a diverting adventure and also allow them to transport more luggage than one could practically take on an airplane. As chronicled elsewhere, the simple three-day voyage began almost 20 hours late and ran rapidly downhill from there, eventually requiring me to fly into El Paso, Texas and drive the remaining 1,400 miles to Atlanta, hauling the luggage along in a rental car. I’m not that superstitious most of the time, and given the experiences we have survived over the past few weeks, the idea of trusting my family to the inconsistencies of our country’s passenger rail system just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Whatever is bothering me today, it’s not that. Maybe it’s the difference in how we’re reacting to the Southbay…

For, try as I might to see it any other way, the truth is that this place is just as I remembered it from my dream, and no less magical than I remember it while awake – at least, to me. For my wife, everything changed 12 days ago; she would rather leave this city and all of the reminders of her life here and the people she has lost, and never return. East Lansing has become a place of trial and challenge for me; even if I should succeed, I don’t know if I could ever really be at peace there. For my wife it has become a refuge; a place with no bad memories, and no painful reminders. I don’t know if she will ever want to leave it; and even if she does, there is no place in this world she wants to go less than the place where part of my soul resides. And that, I regret to say, is only the beginning…

In a time and a place where I have already taken on a challenge that has beaten better minds than mine, I am now facing the near-certainty of conflicts that have destroyed stronger souls than mine, as well. How do I go on from here? How do you keep going when none of the fixed points in your world are there any longer; when the pole-star of your personal heavens has left you, and you can’t say if you will ever see her light again? All of the jests about life-and-death struggles and trials from which I may not return no longer seem funny; the question of whether I will ever come here again just “got real” as our younger brethren say. So before we pass on, to dinner with friends, meetings and partings with family, and vistas of strange and hostile places, let’s pause to say goodbye to the Southbay, and look upon its beauty one last time…