a.k.a. V.J.

One of the many odd byproducts of moving back to my hometown to raise a family was that my kids attended the same elementary school and the same high school that I did. When I would go to those buildings as a parent for open-houses, parent-teacher conferences, or performances, some ghosts of the past would always be lurking around those classrooms and hallways. Both buildings had changed, but they still retained enough of their original layout and decor to trigger memories and reawaken dormant emotional reactions.

After a while, though, my relationship with those schools in the role of a parent represented longer periods of my life than my stints in them as a student. As such, the associations became intermingled, blurred, and ultimately sort of ambiguous. If I ever have grandchildren who attend either school, I have no doubt that the symbolism will become even more muddled.

I was reminded of that school dynamic last week, when it occurred to me that I had been teaching at SUNY Oswego for close to 11 years. That’s not exactly a milestone anniversary, but it represents the longest I have ever been with any single employer. There are some asterisks that go with that record. For one, it’s been a part-time job. Also, I am technically hired on a semester-by-semester basis, so strictly speaking, I haven’t been a continuous employee that whole time. That said, I’ve been there for a long while, and a lot has happened with me and the world at large since January 2013 when I taught my first class.

That 11 years also represents a much longer stretch of time than I spent as an undergraduate on the same campus. There are still some places on campus that, look, feel, (and smell!) the same way they did back in 1990 when I graduated; but, overall, it has transformed quite a bit. It has actually changed noticeably since 2013. The building in which I taught my first class has since been leveled and replaced with a gleaming new structure. My relationship to the institution has also grown more complex as time has gone on, being simultaneously an alumnus, an employee, and currently also the parent of a student.

My point, if I actually have one, is that I have reached a stage in life that I am calling “post-nostalgic.” When I was younger, I was always backward-looking and prone to romanticizing past periods of my life. It was as if the past held some sort of magic that I was trying to recapture…even if life during the periods I was looking back on was far from magical at the time. Now, I’m beyond that kind of thinking. That’s largely because, at my advanced age, “the past” has become vaster and more varied. Familiar places, people, and items have different meanings to me based on what era of connection to them I’m thinking back on. For the most part, the associations are too divergent and complicated to elicit any sort of consistent emotional reaction.

It’s a bit like visiting Europe as an American. It takes a while to recalibrate one’s historical perspective. At home, I always considered artifacts from the mid-18th century to be ancient. Then I went to Germany and saw relics from the time of the Roman Empire. A couple years later, in England, I visited Stonehenge. Suddenly, those French and Indian War sites around Central New York didn’t seem so venerable. A lot of Americans imagine our country’s history as fitting a neat, concise narrative (I don’t, but I suspect I’m in the minority there.) I doubt many Europeans feel that several millennia worth of recorded history about their homelands could be tied up in a neat bow. That’s where I’m at with my personal history. There are simply too many events over too many years tied to the same anchor-points for me to get swept up in generalizations. It all just kind of washes over me.

All that is to say that my relationship with the past isn’t as intense as it once was, but it’s probably a lot healthier. Looking backward, even fondly, prevents one from being fully present in the moment. That’s something I’ve been working on a lot the last few years, but that’s a whole other post.

To be continued…