Outside, it looks like Paris the day after the Nazis invaded. If, of course, the Panzer tanks were replaced by Penske trucks and the German army had enlisted only confused and frightened freshmen and their overbearing parents.
This, of course, marks a milestone:
Today is my last first day of class.
While this is not an original thought -- in fact, it is extremely cliched -- it does encapsulate the terror of its implication in one tidy hackneyed package of fear.
I've been doing the school thing for 20 of my 25 years, and the five where I wasn't are years that I don't remember. The last five, fittingly, are also years that I barely remember, but for different reasons.
But not everything has come full circle. In elementary school, the first day of classes was an EVENT, a day marked on the calendar with the same fear and apprehension that civilizations of old use to have when they signaled the coming of the flood season. We'd trek out to stores and get books, binders, pencils, pencils of other colors, protractors, pencil sharpeners, erasers, white-out, and every other instrument of torture that W.B. Mason could think of.
And now? Yesterday, I realized, "crap, I have class tomorrow." Then I went to bed. Today, I threw my laptop in my bag and walked to class. I carried no books (since I have no clue what classes I'm keeping), no materials other than a pen that might still have ink in it, and only brought with me the hope that I walk into the right classroom.
Perhaps this means I have come full circle and am ready, at long last, to be released into the wild. There will be no first days again, but at this point they have become so rote and tedious, that it is time for everyone to move on.
God help us all.
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