It's beginning to look a lot like Samhain...
Yes, I mean that with the melody. I'd draw little musical notes around it if I knew a way to do that in Blogger.
Anyway.
The trees are turning now, not quite peak, but close, and the fields are full of goldenrod and aster. The apples are coming in heavy from the orchards and the pumpkins are ripening--we've had pumpkin soup and pumpkin bread in the Dining Hall already (no pumpkin spice lattes, though, for that one must go off-campus). The corn has been harvested, and so the dried stalks have appeared as standing bundles in all the doorways of all the buildings on campus. Yesterday, Charlie's team hung the Great Hall with cut bittersweet vine.
And all the classes have entered their final stretch as the entire campus community starts looking towards winter and then graduation. Except me, oddly enough.
It's not that I'm not thinking about it at all, it's that it's not my focus. June has got a job.
She actually started about a month ago--she's the Outdoor Education Director for a private school nearby, a position that allows her to telecommute two to three days a week, minimizing driving, and gives her summers off so she can work for our school. She has benefits and everything (which means I now have health insurance again).
"I feel so grown-up!" she told me, giggling.
But this means we can't leave campus during the break, or at least we can't spend a lot of time off-campus. I can't go 'home,' because campus IS home, because my wife lives here and she has a job nearby. An actual, professional, grown-up job. And it changes how we both think about time and space.
I'm 28, now, and I'm certainly an adult within this community. I have been for a long time. I'm married, most of my friends are married, and I spend most of my time now teaching classes and workshops and things, or working with Steve. Plus my part-time job at the nursery.
But relative to the outer world I am, in a way, still a boy. I mean, I'm a student. I'm mostly broke all the time because I'm a student. I've never had a "real job," meaning one I intended to keep for a long time, and I still don't know exactly what my real job will consist of when I get one. It feels much odder than I expected to have my wife come home to me at night complaining or pleased by all the things professionals can be irritated or pleased by at their work, making thousands, not hundreds, of dollars per month, with health insurance and a retirement plan. A retirement plan?
It's not that I'm jealous, and it's certainly not that I'm uncomfortable with my wife making more than me. It'd that it feels weird being married to a real grown-up.
I talked to Allen about it the other day. He'd just come from class, I met up with him as he was coming across the Central Field toward the Dining Hall, and so he was uncharacteristically dressed in uniform. Our feet crunched a little in the few leaves that hand already fallen and blown out into the field, and a maple leaf had lodged itself in his hair. I couldn't tell if he wanted it to be there or just didn't know about it.
I explained to him, quickly, about feeling like a boy and not wanting to. He smiled.
"I'll let you in on a secret," he said. "We all feel that way. 'Like a kid' is how adulthood feels, most of the time. Or like a young adult when you're not. The mind never catches up to its real age. I have a twenty-year-old son. Twenty! Some days, I'm surprised I'm not twenty. He could give me a grandson now, if he wanted to." He grinned at the idea, amused, I think, at the strangeness of the whole thing.
"I remember you once said 'feelings aren't facts.'"
"I did," he agreed, "Though I was hypothermic at the time. I'd say, rather, that feelings are poor indicators of reality. Good thing, too, or you and I would be stuck being boys forever and we'd miss all the fun of being men. Also, you know, things like this wouldn't work," and he snapped his fingers and one of his ferrets emerged from my uniform hood (where I certainly hadn't known it was), climbed around to my shoulder, and jumped to its master, who kissed it fondly.
"Does he have a name?" I asked.
"Templeton. And the female is Charlotte. You barely reacted. I'm going to have to up the anti, the ferret trick is getting to be old hat."
"I bet you have an old hat," I guessed, and he obligingly produced one.
"I'm getting too predictable."
"If I could predict you, Allen, I wouldn't have to ask you questions. I'd know the answers."
"Well, that's some comfort. Though you have your own answers, too, you know."
"I know. Speaking of which, did you know you have a leaf in your hair? It's quite fetching."
His face fell in surprise and he patted his head cautiously and found and removed the leaf.
"I'd forgotten all about that," he exclaimed, embarrassed, and laughed his merry, boyish laugh.
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