Life 101

Recently, I went to mass at the Newman Center, here in Sacramento, and afterward, when I would normally walk to my car, I found myself walking across the street onto the grounds of Sacramento State University.

As I wandered past the same trees that had grown in the same spots when I was 20 years old, I stopped to consider them with my almost 50-year-old eyes.

The trees had definitely gained some girth around the middle and had clearly rooted themselves even more firmly in the earth.

The most recent generation of scruffy red squirrels danced around on the same lawn, just as they had when I sat among them trying to wrestle a poem out of my head and onto paper in time for class.

The “Round House,” where I used to pick up a very large coffee each morning was now a Java City. The truth is I didn’t like coffee as much as I liked having a vehicle for the cream and sugar.

I spent five years on this campus and earned an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree. My professors fostered and grew my life-long love of language, of writing, of critical thinking, and of reading.

Most of my classes were located in Douglass Hall, which I noted was no longer painted a dull military gray but a warm latte brown. As I stood in front of that stalwart building, I felt very grateful for those five years of learning and of developing my opinions and my personality.

I was given time and space and resources to pick up some adult-level skills and to start to determine what was important to me in this world.

As I wandered through the lush, park-like campus, I marveled that I’d ever had so much to say about Homer’s Iliad that I compulsively banged out a six-page (typed!) paper that won honorable mention in a campus literary competition. And to think only a year ago, I visited the excavations at Troy, in Turkey!

I had actually lost myself, back then, in courses such as Virginia Woolf: Politics of Experience (!), Writing Subjective Non-Fiction, Studies in Whitman and Dickinson, Critical Thinking and Writing, Modern Poetry, Phonetics and Morphology, Linguistics, and The Homeric Imagination!

These days I find myself, more often, watching Project Runway instead of thinking lofty thoughts; less Shakespeare, more CSI.

Still, at the time, I doubt I could have chosen between learning and breathing.

As I walked, the few students that I saw milling around in the early fall heat looked like children, and I had to remind myself that I had somehow produced two of those creatures­–a senior at Chico State and a junior at San Francisco State.

But long before I was bringing new human beings into the world, I had some weighty decisions to make. I remember sitting on a bench outside Douglass Hall, during my senior year, staring off into space. One of my English professors took a seat next to me and asked if everything was okay.

She was an older woman and seemed very wise. I said, “How will I know whether or not I should marry my boyfriend?”

She shook her head and folded her hands. She said, “That’s a tough one because nobody’s perfect. The question is, how imperfect is too imperfect?”

Of course, I was too young and too arrogant to understand that she meant both of us! She didn’t realize, I guess, that I was only weighing his imperfections!

Still, this was the same man who came to campus every night that I had a late class to walk me to my car to be sure I was safe. He had to have some redeeming qualities.

All those years ago, I loved just being on campus. I loved spending long hours at the library, even when the only way to navigate was to use the incomprehensible Dewey decimal system. The Internet was nothing more than a science fiction fantasy at the time.

And in those early days, I didn’t know that I would be facing a longer and more grueling course–a course called Life 101.

My college years were a prerequisite, clearly, but it was Life 101 that would force me to be less flippant and more compassionate, less selfish and more forgiving.

This is not to say, however, that I can’t still hold a grudge like a professional.

That old boyfriend, now a husband of 25 years, snapped at me the other day (completely unjustified, I promise). I had planned never to get over it, when we learned that one of us would have to pick up my parents at the airport.

Their flight had been delayed and they would not land until 2:30 in the morning!

Without complaining, he stayed up half the night, picked them up and took them home, all while I slept comfortably. After that, I had to give up my grudge or seem churlish, even in my own eyes.

Life 101 is an endless, comprehensive, and exhausting course, and one that no one signs up for willingly. As it turns out, it’s a required course.

There are no semester report cards and no stimulating lectures. I don’t know if I’m passing, and no one has stepped forward with my diploma.

And as part of the course, I have had to account for my own imperfections (both of them). It hasn't been easy.

As I made my way back across the street, I felt a little deflated.

No, I wasn’t 20 years old anymore, the major decisions had been made and lived with, the offspring had been launched into the world, the trees and I were all a little bigger around the middle, and the heat was bothering me a lot more than it used to.

I guess that’s why we go to college when we’re young. There is no limit to what we can absorb, we don’t mind that nothing is convenient, and the possibilities seem endless.

I still love Austen and Woolf, but I’m not sure I want to take a full semester course on either of them.

They had an awful lot to say.