A day of high emotion

My alarm went off at 5:50 this morning, just as it does every weekday morning, and as always I lay there for a bit, listening to MPR, and then heaved myself out of bed and showered and had a lot of coffee while reading LJ, as always. And then, as always, I shoved all my stuff into my bag and grabbed my keys and pulled the front door shut behind me and walked down to the corner, to catch the bus to campus. Just as I have done uncounted times before, over the past seventeen years. Except that -- this was the last time I'll be making that trip, the last day at my job, the last time, the last time, the last time.

When I first walked out the front door of this house seventeen years ago, and caught the bus and went to campus, I was working crappy temp jobs and trying to figure out what to do with my life; and then I was going to grad school orientation, and then to classes, and more classes, and practica, and prelims, and grad assistantships, and teaching assistantships, and then my for-real jobs, year after year after winter after summer. And yet, the seventeen years I've been making that trip from this house is only a subset of the years of my life I've spent going to that campus, for jobs or classes or hanging out in the library or swimming lessons, starting in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration and extending to -- well, to today.

Because today was the last day of my last job at this university, and in less than a week I'll have left this city. Ever since I made that decision six weeks ago I've been dealing with it intellectually, or optimistically, or--whatever, but only in the past few days have I actually begun coming to terms with it *emotionally.* When I was driving back from Vividcon, in the caravan with lapillus and jackiekjono and heresluck, I got all teary about how these wonderful women, whom I have pretty much taken it for granted I can get together with anytime, will soon be halfway across the continent from me, to be seen only at cons.

And then today, after I'd cleaned up my files and cleared off my computer, I went down to the local watering hole, to which I'd invited a bunch of my university friends, and there was gathering and drinking and laughter and many hugs, and people gave me cards and someone brought a cake, and I got teary yet again. People kept saying, "Speech! Speech!" because I am usually not at all reluctant to stand up and run my mouth, but all I could say this time was that I felt like I was swimming in the vast river of memory, struggling and wading and paddling against a current that could sweep me away and drown me. I can't let myself be overcome by emotion, but I can't not feel it either.

The watering hole where we were meeting used to be, back in the 60s, a bookstore where I bought volumes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and James Joyce, when I was a pretentious high school kid. Just down the street was the place that used to be the old drugstore with the lunch counter where six-year-old me used to stop in and get hot chocolate, on bitter winter days, after swimming lessons, in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration, before catching the bus home. The sidewalks I walked to get to the watering hole where we met are ones I have walked uncountable times before, in heat, in snow, in the grip of teen depression, in the exhausted aftermath of doctoral prelims, in the dreary trudge of heading off for another day at the job.

People came in greater numbers than I'd expected, and they gave me cards, which I also hadn't expected, and someone brought a cake, which was a *total* surprise. I did my best to circulate and spend some time with everyone, and everyone was affectionate and encouraging and gave me hugs and told me how proud of me they were, and how much they'd miss me, and that I was doing the right thing. And I hugged them back, all these wonderfully decent honest hardworking people, with whom I'd suffered during all the insane upheaval of the past few years, and kept saying, "Come out to Seattle! Come to visit! Come see me! Let's not lose touch!"

Finally the crowd thinned out, and I made my drunken escape and walked down to the bus stop. I pulled my mp3 player out, turned it on, and as the bus arrived, the random-play setting cued up Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, and I began crying again, thinking about how much I had been through with these people, how much they'd meant to me, and how I might never actually see them again.

...And tomorrow I begin the final round of packing. A week from this moment, I will (I most devoutly hope) be in Dickinson, North Dakota, resting up from the first day's drive, and two days after that, I should be in Seattle. Right now, though, I think I'm going to have another glass of whisky, and then go to bed.