back-to-school season

“Finish every day and be done with it.
For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember.
You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely,
and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This day for all that is good and fair.
It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Volume 2, 1836 - 1841

Long before the weathervanes of corporate retail brought out their marketed wares, the liminality of back-to-school season became very clear to me. Summer heat and humidity yielded to tree-bending blustery air, and on a random morning I suddenly remembered walking to grammar school in new shoes. Changed slants of light and earlier evenings indicate the setting of August. Though my graduate school thesis term was many years ago, memories- especially of my earliest education- vividly remain. The first day of a new school year was a burst to the senses: the look of new spaces, unfamiliar sounds, and the strong smells of industrial cleaning ingredients. At Public School No.13, in New York City, classroom numbers had their corresponding numbers painted on the gridded asphalt surface of the schoolyard; this became the place to line up every morning, prior to processing into school for the day. That was embedded within my first five years of schooling. Many other formalities followed, but as my father observed, “when you’re six years old, one year occupies fifteen percent of your life.” Back-to-school has always meant a fresh start, and at every age a learning of room numbers, names, and navigational strategies. A common post-secondary puzzle required knowing various campus buildings and the time needed to connect between them. To this day, late-August and early-September rekindle memories of new beginnings. Notwithstanding all the teaching I’ve been doing since college, I continue to purchase a new calendar book every summer. Labor Day Weekend is essentially the recognition of a new year.

A few of my classmates at the High School of Art & Design, New York.

Some of us are physically affected by the season. Back-to-school acquired my added connotation of allergy season. Parallel to my beginning high school, my one allergic condition emerged, which is ragweed pollen. As some of you know, some years are tougher than others. At the start of sophomore year, as a woeful fourteen-year-old, I had several protracted sneezing spells that frightened the teacher such that I was re-situated to the back of the classroom. That’s a great first impression to make for a teen, and surely not how I wanted to be noticed. Over the years, I learned to be equipped with neutralizing medication. On a better note, back-to-school meant reuniting with familiar faces and meeting new people. At the start of my senior year at the High School of Art & Design, at age seventeen, a number of old friends noticed how tall I’d suddenly gotten. New school years- both in high school and undergrad college, both four year institutions- began with re-acquaintances and recounting our summers. Fresh starts, in themselves, open to new horizons. And every venture, at any age and level, needs its equipage. Notebooks, writing materials- including aromatic wooden pencils, sometimes a new bookbag.

I still have this- from a Maine College of Art graphic design prof
who said to me, "Here is an E for your excellent work!"

Because of my high school’s focus on the visual arts, there were always supply lists to be filled. My mother, an experienced artist, and I made errands to the famous Pearl Paint- in SoHo- for our provisioning. Art college in Maine also meant filling supply lists, but with less variety. Unlike all the public schools I’d attended, college and university life required purchasing my own books, adding to the “new year” rituals. To send myself off in style to graduate school in Boston, I drove to nearby L.L. Bean and treated myself to a rugged backpack for the new journey. Each and every academic year began with reminders in the forms of brisk air, longer shadows, sneezing, and motivation to reach beyond my self.

Above: From my matriculating days in the MA program
at UMass-Boston. Notice my notebook-holder.

Below: Simmons University, Boston.

“Major in the Rest of Your Life” read the banner in the large vestibule of Boston’s Simmons University, highlighting my first day en route to my masters degree. It took two years of extremely hardworked matriculation to reach that beginning, but my gratitude produced its own energy. I hope Simmons has reused that brilliant motto. It may surprise those who’ve known me since my postgrad years, that I did not like school. I dreaded it. During childhood, I called the daily trudge “going to jail” and those tiresome stretches of time (in any duration) seemed agonizingly endless. Everything changed with the intense challenges of graduate schooling, which I loved. Perhaps it was the added years of work experience, but indeed I chose new vocations and goals, and I also chose each one of my courses. Back-to-school was a series of forward motions, even further hastened by summer sessions. The subject matter, as I advanced from one program to the next, became increasingly fascinating to me: from history, with the addition of philosophy, and then finally to archival sciences. With each new semester, the projects and assignments intensified- including publishing about book conservation. I took to beginning each academic year by watching that great film, The Paper Chase. For those timed, cheat-proof, fill-the-blue-booklet exams, I had a magic fountain pen which I’d bought in Paris. Every evening before one of those draining experiences, I’d make myself a brain-enriching fish dinner, and would perch that Waterman on my stereo to the tune of Meyerbeer’s benediction of the daggers from his opera Les Huguenots. All of this prep amounted to straight A’s. The pen wrote a perfect score.

The Waterman fountain pen with the 4.0 average.

My love for learning hit its permanent stride, when I joined the Boston Athenaeum immediately after graduating with my Masters degree. I’ve since lectured and taught there. Back-to-school is something I’ve been experiencing and supporting as an educator, and can attest that pursuing my own continued learning is an unending feast. In his Collations on the Hexaemeron, Saint Bonaventure wrote, “The door to wisdom is the vehement desire for it.” The season associated with the re-entry to school for so many among us retains its significance for me. Just as scholarship is stewardship, studies need application- all of which require conscientiousness. In his brilliant work and ready companion to me, The Intellectual Life, by A.G. Sertillanges, the chapter called Preparation for Work is especially appropriate for the season. His use of the word génie doesn’t quite translate as “genius,” but is something more like “inspired intellect.” He referred to this kind of wisdom as something that “stimulates us and gives us confidence. The stir it arouses is a spur to ardent personal endeavor, revealing a vocation, correcting overanxious timidity. A sense of sublimity breaks on our soul like a sunrise.” He described how we can use inspiring source material to fuel our ambitions and projects. Sertillanges’ references about cherished personal readings amount to an individual’s assembly of strategic reserves. Their cultivation increases with each measure of progress, such that “back-to-school” encounters less and less inertia. Studies lend well to spiritual formation, in an ongoing stream. Navigating currents and tides, we bring along our prized primary sources and faithful instruments.

I was well aware that my room at Simmons was on Pilgrim Road.