And so the end is near. I can see it, just over there on the horizon — the end of the semester.
When you work at a college, years are no longer years. They’re semesters. And semesters fly by like someone’s yanking them away with string.
They start out slow, gain speed and roar out of sight before you can say, “What the heck’s a semester?”
And when they end, they take a whole new crop of kids with them, headed for the real world to claim jobs, make families and wonder for the rest of their lives how they could have run up $20,000 in pizza debt.
This semester I’m losing a bunch of them. My kids. I’ve been with Flagler College almost two years now, and my office runs the student newspaper. So I’ve got a chance to get to know a bunch of them, and it’s getting me a little misty thinking about them going away.
What will I do with my time? Work?
All day they pop into my office, dropping their bodies in a chair like you dump clean laundry on the bed. Sometimes they sigh or stare. Rarely do they have anything important to say, and usually I’m in the middle of some panic attack or crisis involving mass quantities of money I shouldn’t have spent. I speak fast like my calf is brushing up against an exposed electrical wire.
“What’sup?how’sitgoing?Youdoingalright.Goodgoodgood.Nowwhattheheckdoyouwantanditbetterbeimportantbecauseifitisn’tI’mcallingsecurity … again.”
They don’t have anything important to say because they’re college kids and the world is a giant pool of inexpensive time that can be spent at their leisure.
They touch things on my desk and ask about various items.
“What’s this?” they say.
“That’s a paperclip.”
“What’s this?”
“That’s the court order requiring you to leave my desk alone.”
I get important sounding phone calls, cover the speaker and say things like, “I really need to take this.”
“No problem,” is the answer. “Got all the time in the world.”
Of course they do. That’s how I was when I was in school. There was something truly wonderful about hanging out in someone’s office, knowing that they couldn’t get any work done, and making them answer ridiculous question after ridiculous question, like: “So what’s it like being that old?” or “Is it true that as you age and hair grows in your ears you can hear it rustle?”
Now they ask things like that of me.
I like to think I have wisdom to impart. The other night during the student newspaper layout, I helped a girl burn a music CD.
“Aren’t you embarrassed?” I asked her. “You’re the youth of America with all your technological savvy. Yet you need help from Dinosaur Sam.”
Sometimes I have really wonderful things to tell them, and say it, and they appear to listen, and I think to myself, this is fantastic, we really made a connection, and I might have just changed a young person’s life, to which they respond, “Did you know you actually have two parts in your hair today” or “that sideburn is longer than the other.”
I’m going to miss this bunch. How I’ve come up with the perfect nicknames for them: Heffery instead of Jeffery, The Hippie Twins, Moody Lou, Buzzhead, Mrs. Drama Queen, Ugh!, Guy whose name I don’t know and Eddie. There are others.
I’ll miss how they don’t ever do anything I say, and laugh when I get mad. The more mad I get, the more they laugh, and eventually I go home and have a good cry.
How they think I must be really important because I have a water cooler in my office.
“So you buy that with your expense account?” they ask.
“No, it fell off a truck I was riding behind.”
They’re a good bunch, and I’m gonna’ miss them all. Soon I’ll begin training new ones, and answering new questions about paperclips and why my hair parts like it does. But will it ever be the same again? I hope so.