Back to School

Well, tomorrow is the first day of classes for my graduate program.

Of course, this will be vastly different from the first days of school of years past...  As a child, the first day of school meant entering classrooms carefully decorated by teachers - featuring fall leaves, apples, and maps tacked to walls.  It meant meeting new teachers, catching up with classmates on summer camps and vacations.  Making name tags and putting freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils and workbooks into desks with past pupils' names and doodles etched into their surfaces.  The first day of school felt like autumn.  It was a new season, a new year, and it came with all new accessories - a carefully selected new outfit for the first day (first, usually matching my best friend; later, usually matching half the school since we all hit the back-to-school sales at Gap), fresh notebooks.  Text books handed out in class, and carefully covered in brown paper bag book jackets...

The first day of school in high school and college was more focused on making sure I knew which buildings my classes were in.  In the years since my Amherst graduation, I have had many a school nightmare, all of them some variation on a theme of being lost  - not knowing my schedule or where a particular classroom might be.  I'm pretty sure that since all of my classes are in the same building, that nightmare won't come true.

My first class is Organizational Behavior.  So far it looks interesting, and I'm very glad that Stats is not first up on the docket!  Being in class from 6-9pm will be a challenge, but hopefully it won't take too long for my brain to get used to it.

I'm sure JP would be proud of me tonight.  I so wish I could be sharing this with him.  It's always hard not to have him here to talk to, and of course this is nothing compared to not having him here to share in the joys and challenges of raising our baby boy.  But this really feels like the first New Big thing that I'm doing on my own, the first thing that is separate from us.  And so while I feel the usual emotions anticipating the start of school - excitement, some nervousness - it also makes me sad.