Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

August 30, 2023

Not quite seven months ago, I wrote this paragraph:

For them this will be an early leg of a long journey that I hope leads them somewhere fascinating and exciting. For me, alone, it will be the last train on this particular journey. When it pulls into the terminus in May, I’ll have to get off, ready or not. Then I will have to do something I haven’t done in a long time. I’ll have to board a different train to a new destination from an unfamiliar platform. I guess that could be pretty exciting too.

Beating in Air, February 8, 2023

I was about to drive from my home to Pacific Lutheran University to begin my last term of teaching before retirement. “Them” referred to the students who would sit in my class that day.

This morning I lay in bed during the pre-dawn hours thinking about the single entry on my calendar for today. It is a task that I already completed last week. So, in effect, the day is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. That makes it like so many other days on my calendar lately.

Then it hit me. Today, August 30, is a day that I have been anticipating for years with equal measures of excitement and dread. I have become so conditioned to framing the way I think about my days with whatever shows up in my calendar app, that the emptiness of the listing for today made me almost miss it.

This morning my (former) colleagues will gather on campus for the first university-wide meetings that mark the beginning of a new academic year. It’s a day that, in the past, always arrived too early for me, but that also held tremendous promise. It embodied both the worst and the best of academic life—the end of the wonderful freedom of summer (sometimes even a sabbatical leave), and a new beginning filled with exciting possibilities.

I have thought for years that I would mark this particular “first day” in a special way. If I couldn’t be on a plane heading off to some exotic adventure (which clearly, I will not be), I would at least not do my usual drive-through at the coffee shop, but would instead go somewhere to sit down, order breakfast, and take my time doing it.

But this isn’t just the “first day” at the university. It’s also the day that I will receive my last university paycheck—ever. The memory of waiting for my first full-time paycheck in September 1980 is still vivid. It was unbelievably small by today’s standards, but it represented the arrival of a long-awaited moment. It made the future seem more secure, and all of my schooling and job-searching seemed to be paying off. I scarcely ever considered this day, when the last of those paychecks would finally go into my account, and once again, I would be at loose ends. Of course, that’s not entirely true, but with every big change comes uncertainty about the future. This is an uncertainty that I haven’t faced for decades.

The day has finally come for me to board that next train to a new destination. The empty entry on my calendar means that, at least for today, no one is waiting for me to do something, or produce something, or say something when I get to wherever it is that I’m going. Today it really is all about the journey.