Everytime you say goodbye, I cry a little

I knew I wanted to be a professor before I knew what I wanted to be a professor of. The rewards seemed so obvious: most of the independence of being self-employed without any of the risk, being surrounded by educated people with active minds, a comfortable if not posh standard of living, and great scenery to boot – well groomed college campuses and fresh-faced 20 year olds everywhere you look. I have since become aquainted with the downsides as well, though fortunately they are few: having to put up with the smug anti-intellectualism of some conservative types, the strenuously competitive job market which in turn limits one's choices of where to live. I think the very worst of the downsides, though, is the transitory nature of academic life. With so many people coming and going, you're pretty much guaranteed a few weepy goodbyes a year. To make it worse, you tend to spend so much time with so few people, it's not like you can just decide not to get attached.

I skipped graduation this year because I just can't stand it. It’s the same scene every year, with the bell tower and blue sky as backdrop to the stage and the Green dressed up like an LL Bean catalog: little brothers stumbling around in yellow oxfords and clip-on ties, black labradors with Dartmouth-green bandanas around their collars, and grandpas standing across the street to keep pipes and cigars at a safe distance. I love seeing the off-color clumps, here and there, of those visiting from farther away; entire extended families hauled in from India, Africa, or Asia to witness the moment. They move into the dormitory commencement-housing en masse and immediately take over the kitchens to feed the children the food they're accustomed to. On the first trip out of their home country, dads and brothers-in-law recording every moment on video. And why shouldn’t they? This is it, the leaping-off point, the moment every parent waits for and dreads, when all the preparation you can possibly put into a human life begins to play out. It’s when they say the most profound kind of goodbye, too: goodbye to their role as parents (at least, to the graduating child). With that kind of scene as the backdrop to all the personal goodbyes that come around graduation time in the life of an academic, can you blame me if that Joni Mitchell song about the carousel of life starts swelling in my ears, and I get a little quiver in my lip? I don't know what I'll do when I actually HAVE to go because of my position. I can imagine a ritual of dread and cleansing repeated every year, starting with pulling the robes and cowl out of the closet and ending with a dunking in the whiskey bottle, and the tender and pasty-mouthed next morning signalling a new emotional season as surely as labor day begins preparation for the winter to come.

I survived my most recent round of goodbyes last week, to Russ and Fay who have gone off to their first teaching jobs in Texas, to Chris, a New Hampshire country boy off to a whole different world in Miami, and a repeat performance for Landis and Leanne, who had already made their exits but came back to torment... uh, for a visit. I have no doubt that I’ll see all these people again, which is comforting. But proximity is a big part of friendship, and these folks are now (probably) forever out of my daily life, and daily is exactly how we all pass our lives. And there's just more and more of this to come.