The Keys You Turn in. The Keys You Get.
I went to campus to turn in my last library book and
maybe clean out the office I’ve had for the past year. It didn’t occur to me that it would be any
big deal for me. So I got up to my
office and started getting stuff collected and throwing stuff away. I paused to check my e-mail and there it was:
the congratulatory e-mail from the thesis office telling me my dissertation was
approved and I was good to go for graduation; pretty much the last
administrative step down a five year long road.
Boom. Finality.
I managed to get
the stuff I needed to take home from my office in one bag and with that last
library book in my hand, I went down to the Glasscock Center office and turned
in my three keys: the one to my office, the one to the suite, and the one to
the building. Then I went to the library
and handed in the last of what must have been hundreds of books over the past
few years. I didn’t want to leave it in
the drop box. I wanted to put it in
someone’s hand. To the bored student
worker behind the counter, that book was one of dozens she’d handle during her
shift. For me, the last book at Sterling
Evans Library.
Bang. Finality.
Then I went by my department office to turn in the three keys that gave
me access to the spaces I needed as a Graduate Assistant Teacher. No one was in the office, so I wrote a note on
a card, stapled it to a rubber band that held the three keys together and left
them in an envelope in the admin assistant’s box.
Zap. Finality.
Keys that are issued to you represent a certain amount
of trust and responsibility. They’re
also how you know you belong. You can
get into a space from which most people are restricted. You’re "one of us." Handing those keys in undoes all that. Giving back those keys stamped with the ominous
and impersonal “state property DO NOT replicate” on them is tantamount to
locking yourself out. Out of the
building. Out of the organization. That’s pretty final.
On my way out of the department office I looked in my assigned box, the one that will soon have another grad student´s name on it, more
out of reflex than anything. A big
envelope contained the course evaluations from the class I taught in the spring
semester. I couldn't resist taking a
look right there in the empty office. They
were statistically the best evaluations I've had in four years of teaching as a
grad student. Some of the students wrote
nice comments about me on the backs of the forms, reminders that I had done
some good on a personal level; that I helped make an obligatory course more fun,
meaningful and rewarding for some students.
And that’s really what my next profession will be all about.
Cervantes wrote that Alonso Quijano was about 50 years old when he decided to
change his name to Don Quixote and strike out on adventures as a knight. I’ll be nine days shy of my 50th
birthday when I graduate with the Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies. The Tuesday after I’ll be a professor of
Spanish at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas (can there be
anything more quixotic than to be a professor in the Humanities in 2013?). A new title, new profession, new place and a
new environment.
By almost every measure, we’ll be scaling down our
lives. I turned in six keys at
A&M. They’ll give me two at
OBU. In early August we´ll temporarily move into a little duplex right next to campus while we build a new home about half the size of
the one we've lived in for nearly eight years.
Bryan-College Station have about 150,000 people. Arkadelphia 10,500. Texas A&M will have 50,000 students in
the fall. OBU 1,500. But the most important metric: 20 students at a time, will
be the same.
Moving your own household goods, especially when you know
you’re going to be in a smaller space, makes you look closely at all your stuff
and ask, “Do I like this thing so much that I’ll sweat my butt off to carefully
protect it, carry it out to a truck, drive it seven hours and unpack it in the
August heat?” Boy, that question will make you better at letting stuff go. Am I really going to wear this shirt ever
again? No, to Goodwill it goes. Will I
ever open this book again? No, to Half-price
Books it goes. Is this item I don’t really
need useable by someone else? Yes, give it away. No, to the curb for bulk pick-up.
But what about the people you fear you may never see again? It’s been much tougher to delete them from my
phone so I haven’t done it. Because it’s
those personal relationships you keep and you carry with you and they don’t
take up any room on the truck. People
you studied and partied with. People you worshiped and prayed with. People you
coached with. People you trained and raced and suffered and crashed with. Those people have given me keys to themselves
that I’ll never have to give back.
