Category: ENG 494 EI

English is a precarious major for a college student to pursue, because unlike several other majors, there’s no narrow path to a “career”. Engineers go engineering, law students go lawyering, and business majors become businesspeople. But what of the English Major? How do English majors go ‘Englishing’? When thinking about English majors, the two predominant professions which spring to mind are teaching and writing. I suppose there’s a modicum of security with teaching, but ultimately, society’s devalued their cause. The median teaching salary in America has never been lucrative, but what’s more troubling, is that in recent years, society has assaulted teachers’ autonomy. There have been book bans stemming from a section of society entwined in the warm, comfortable embrace of ignorance. And there’s a proliferation of mass shootings within school walls, as craven politicians put the onus of ‘peacekeeping’ back on teachers. In 2022, society has rendered teaching too thankless, too perilous a profession. And for these reasons, for my sanity, it isn’t viable. My admiration endures for teachers, but I don’t have the spine for it. I’m a far better student. And I’m not even that great of a student.

So what if I become a Writer with my English degree? Well, that may be one of the least secure career paths a person can take in a capitalistic hungry society. Not to mention, one of the loneliest. Poring over blank white pages, trying to squeeze some semblance of coherence through my fingers, under the pressure of a buzzing deadline. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. So what is the English major to do? How does one marry their “expertise” with the self-centered nature of American practicality? How do you make a living for yourself, in which your family is fed and housed, by being an expert in “English”? 

There’s no easy answer to this question. At least there isn’t for me. But I’ve thought about the basic question in depth: what am I going to do with an English degree from the University of Massachusetts in 2023? When this pursuit which began during the darkest, coldest days of the pandemic, finally ends, what are you going to do? The basic, specific answer keeps reverberating around my head, but it’s perhaps too difficult to answer without proper context. The broad answer may seem like a lateral move, but with English, there’s a synthesis which carries over into all walks of modern life. To gain a deeper understanding of the specificity of the answer, one must go backwards in order to understand my intentions when moving forward.

The year was 2017, and my wine and spirits career was stagnating. I’d lost some verve for wine, as it became a necessary evil in my life. On long weekends, I’d escape my small apartment in New York City, and go up to visit my family in Vermont. My aunt Dorsi, was going through a difficult period of her life. She’d been battling cancer at the time, and the degradation of her physical state was especially jarring because in her heyday, she was a world class athlete. She’d set swimming records in the 50 and 100 meter butterfly at her alma mater, Ithaca College, and now she was gaunt, dropping to under a hundred pounds for the first time since childhood. 

She had her designated smoking room next to her bedroom for her medical marijuana (and going through chemo, she spent most of her time sleeping). I developed a deep appreciation for how much cannabis helped her. She could stomach small amounts of food after smoking, and she’d feel well enough to come downstairs from her room to join family gatherings. After she died, I quit all association with wine & spirits, and gravitated toward medical cannabis. 

I was swept up in the idea that a flower with natural terpenes (essential oils) could be anything you wanted it to be. If you need energy, you could gather a cultivar which popped with black pepper, lemon zest, and tropical fruit. And if you wanted to sleep, you’d look for something with cake, cookies, and gas. My new obsession had spilled over to my free time, as I often found myself distracted by websites such as Leafly, Strainfinder, and Reddit. When the pandemic restricted us indoors, while trying to cure my insane boredom, I created an educational YouTube show about cannabis and named it “Cloudland”. Writing, producing, editing, and creating all became obsessive and rewarding activities when the final product would finally hit the page. And over the past year plus when I’ve been occupied by school, my passion hasn’t waned, and I merely consider myself on pause for the pursuit of a personal promise. The promise was I told myself and my family I’d finish my college degree. And I will. 

In my second essay for this class I wrote: “What I didn’t realize was that the greatest thing English offered me was the ability to understand. It helped me understand how language can be used to help others, to offer support without misunderstandings, and to offer love when physical boundaries are more fortified than ever.” But perhaps what I didn’t realize the most important thing about studying English was how, unlike several other majors, it’s applicable to all walks of life in this corner of the world. As we synthesize thought and communicate with each other, how does that manifest itself? Through English.

My goal is to utilize my understanding of the English language to give care beyond traditional methods. In the old days, due to prohibition, weed was seedy, it was sold in dirty bags by crooks and angle shooters. My parents, and their parents before them still harbor stereotypes: people who smoke weed are somehow lazier, dirtier, and “dopier” by association. But anyone who’s spent significant time with more than a couple people who use medical cannabis, knows the stereotype couldn’t be further from the truth. I’d like to redefine what cannabis means to society. Take it out of the darkness, and bring it into the light. I want to challenge the antiquated notions in which society views it. Even open minded people are still stuck in the stigmatic lawlessness they grew up in. But all the “Reefer Madness” tomfoolery became tropes that permeated into society’s standards, and historically these tropes have been used to systematically persecute subsections of society.

In practical terms, this means three courses of action. The first COA is, come January, I’m throwing my businessperson hat on, and I’ll be starting my own cannabis company in New York City. If that fails, I’ll go north to Newburyport, Massachusetts and work in cultivation with my friend, Dave. And if that fails, I’ll do something else. The second course of action is I’m bringing back “Cloudland”, my educational show about cannabis on YouTube. And third, and perhaps the most helpful, is I’ll be an advocate. I’ve already seen how state governments have implemented “pay to play” licensing for businesses. I’ve seen how states (including Massachusetts) are price gouging their clientele for no other purpose than profit. And I’ve seen so much more, and I will continue to speak out against big business, corruption and substandard production. Instead I’ll advocate for small farmers, caregivers, and businesses. And more than anything in life, long after I stop taking classes and receive a piece of paper denoting this journey, I’ll remain a student. A student of craft, of English, of the world.  

During the cursed days of 2020 and most of 2021, I went to live with my grandmother in a remote town located in central Vermont called Pomfret. We established a mutually beneficial relationship: in exchange for a finished basement to live in while a vaccine was being developed, I helped her out with basic tasks like taking out the trash, and troubleshooting simple computer problems. When she’d accidentally zoom the screen up to 125% or lose the sound on her speakers, she’d yell out “HELP.” I’d stride up the stairs like a hero, and after fixing her problem in less than 30 seconds, she’d say “Oh my, you’re a genius!” And I’d shrug it off with a chuckle, but quietly think “hmmm… maybe I am…” 

My grandmother, Ann Raynolds (née Ann Ellis), is where I trace my competitive streak. She inherited hers from my great grandfather, George Ellis Adams who succumbed to polio (covid before covid) in his 40’s. The rest of my family is disappointingly blasé about competition, but when my grandmother and I find ourselves locked in a duel of backgammon or gin rummy, you’d think there were some stakes well beyond a crudely drawn star next to your name on the scoresheet. But it’s absurdly fun to play parlor games with her, and she’s amused by my gamesmanship and banter. Ahead of the game, I’ll say things like “Oh you’re goin’ down grandma!” If she’s on a lucky streak, I’ll act indignant “Oh you gotta be freaking kidding me!” And when I lose, I act bereft in a deadpan fashion, “Excuse me grandma while I retire to the basement and cry myself to sleep.” And she just laughs with delight.

Beyond a penchant for gaming, she’s been obsessed with politics from a young age, ever since she got out in the world after High School and witnessed segregation firsthand. She was arrested in Chicago during the civil rights movement and spent the night in jail. She remains a Bernie Sanders fan and still tries to make it to see him when he regularly stumps around the green mountain state. She’s actively involved in healthcare and zoning committees, voluntarily Zooming in every week.   

In the summer of 2019, during the Trump presidency, she brought me to a local ordinance meeting in White River Junction. The point of voting on the ordinance would limit ICE’s ability to operate locally, as they profiled people of color, detained them, and generally did the shitty things ICE does. The meeting lasted seven and a half grueling hours. It was like something out of Parks and Recreation, though completely sinister with nary a dash of humor. Obviously the Trumpistans were the scariest in the room: Unhinged, frightened, (likely armed) humorless boomers who were freaked out by all their new queer neighbors of color. But the liberals, reasonable to a fault, compounding their opposition to the MAGAts, were also  prone to some nasty infighting. Meanwhile most of the councilmen seemed underinformed, and frankly…a bit daft about what they were even voting on. 

And there I was, counting down the time until it was over. But my grandmother was  gripped to her chair, and watched all of this like it was the Breaking Bad series finale. She usually went to bed around 9, and when the clock had inched to midnight, I was stunned she still had any energy left in the tank. The meeting adjourned after discourse had been sufficiently buried in the muck. Not only did the ordinance fail to pass, I remember a college-aged black woman calling a young, black, male, city council member an “Uncle Tom”,  and saying “your ancestors would be ashamed of you.” As we drove back to my grandmother’s house at 12:37,  I was relieved, thinking I’ll never go to one of these again. That’s when she said  “wasn’t that exciting?”

She’s been driving regularly recently. The stereotype tends to be: “old people”, specifically “little old ladies”, are slow drivers. But when it comes to my grandmother, this stereotype couldn’t be any further from the truth. When she insists on driving, I take a deep breath, reflect on how lucky I’ve been in life, say “Okay grandma”, and proceed to hold onto the handle above the passenger door as we barrel down the dirt roads of Vermont’s countryside. I’ve learned the technical term for the handle attached to the roof is the “Jesus handle” because you hold onto it, thinking “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I’M GOING TO DIE.” Last summer, she received a speeding ticket for going 45 in a 25 down Quechee’s narrow Main Street. Whenever she drives on the dirt-paved country roads, she speeds by pedestrians, leaving but a handful of inches separating her Subaru from clipping someone who, up until encountering my grandmother, believed they were about to engage in a relaxing stroll, and not a near death experience. 

She isn’t driving anymore. Recently, as she went to retrieve her mail from the post office, she broke her arm while attempting to turn the steering wheel. Not merely relegated to a freak accident/isolated incident, the break revealed the bone density of her arm was symptomatic of a deeper problem. 

She’s 94 years old and she’s beat cancer three times, breast cancer twice, ovarian cancer once. And as of a couple weeks ago, I will root for her to beat it a fourth time as she’s been diagnosed with lung cancer (she hasn’t smoked a cigarette since 1951). She’s at home right now, and she’s in good spirits, but the prognosis isn’t great. While the timeframe isn’t reliable, in a recent visit with her, she told me she’s prepared to die within the next six months. And while the idea of having less than six months left crushes me, she couldn’t be more at peace about it. She speaks of death as not only a part of life, but a crucial part of life. She’s outlived two husbands (including my grandfather) and she’s even buried her youngest daughter- my aunt, who died at 52 after her own battle with breast cancer. Neither my grandfather or aunt were accepting of death, even after they both knew their cancers metastasized beyond life-saving treatment options. Even my father (her son), admitted he is “scared shitless” of death, and would far prefer to die in a swift accident than have to face a visible timeline of his own mortality. My grandmother dismissed his fears, “there’s no sense in worrying about that (death).” Her flippance in the face of death, is something I’ve admired deeply: Yes you’re going to die. So what are you gonna do about it? 

 The depth of gratitude I have is unending to be blessed with, not only the grandmother I did, but the breadth of time I’ve had with her. I’m 38 years old, and she’s known me for all of them. She’s seen me through my youth, when I was a bit of a ne’er do well, and she’s seen me come out the other side, her father’s son through and through, devoted to the cause of keeping the family close. I love her and my heart is with her as I write this. Regardless of what remains out of my control and the collective’s, I will cherish the remaining time she is here with us, whether it be weeks, months or, cross my fingers, years. Maybe even during this blessed time, I’ll bust out the backgammon board, and we can play one more time.  

The subject line was befuddling: “time 2 bool.” 

Time to “bool”? 

What is “booling”? 

The email was from Cleo in Comp Lit 351, and I was a little nervous to open it. I didn’t know Cleo besides a digital face inside a square on my screen amongst a 5 x 5 table of various faces and backgrounds. I talked to her a couple times during my new least favorite thing in the world: Zoom breakout rooms. She seemed interesting. For example, as a submission for a recent assignment, she drew a picture of two chickens with penises for tongues, their wings brandishing guns pointed at each other as an allegory for a short story about Israel/Palestine relations. Also, I knew she was roommates with another girl Clara, who was in one of my other classes (English 146), a fact that was established between them after they’d heard me yap away on Zoom during class while the other one was in the room. I didn’t know much about Cleo (or Clara) beyond that, and in these queasy times, I’d never judge someone solely from Zoom or a drawing of two chickens with penis tongues. 

This whole Zoom classes thing had its benefits, there was no commuting, no requirement to shower, and it was easier to disassociate from what was occurring if you just weren’t feeling it that day. You could shut off the camera without any real consequence. 

The downsides were incalculable, in fact I don’t know if we’ll ever process the depth of damage done to a whole generation of young people brazenly left out to dry by their government and their school administrators. Stuck paying full tuition as they sit tethered to a dorm or their parents house. Class is important, but in my opinion, the early college years are meant for escapism, revelry, adventure, shiftless roaming, etc. This Zoom thing had completely nuked the natural inclination to socialize. Instead we were all stuck in this rigid, digital system, trying to connect through a void riddled in virus.

Fortunately for me, I’m a bit older than the average undergrad, and my social circle has been established for longer than many of my peers have been alive. So the impact of missing out on the “college experience” doesn’t quite have the same effect for me. Anyway, I returned to my original thought: what the fuck is booling?          

I looked up “bool” in the urban dictionary and the definition is as follows…

Bool

1. To hang out, relax, do nothing, or otherwise wait with little action; chill 

A weird wave of elusive flattery washed over me. Cleo and Clara want to hang out with me?  

I opened the email…

Tyler!!!

Clara and I have been talking about our individual interactions with you, and we’ve established a consensus that you seem like a cool dude, a real one, a mysterious and passionate one, and we’d like to get to know you better. Anyways, Clara and I will both be two weeks since our second covid shot on may 15, and if you’re around this summer we’d love to have you over and hang out!!

I know this is literally the weirdest way to approach a person and i am so sorry for that but hey whats a gal to do during a pandemic?

Cheers,

Cleo from complit351
Before I had time to process the first email, I received a second email…

So I read that email to clara and she thinks i worded it weirdly enough that it will make it sound like we want to sleep with you so i thought id clarify and say that is not what I meant when I referred to your “passion”. i am just saying this to appease Clara, although i suppose it was very very odd wording.

Then a third email…

i am actually cringing so hard at myself rn please forgive me

Then a fourth email popped up, but this time, it was from Clara…

Cleo Why.

I guess they didn’t know how much older I was (and still am). How could they? Until any real life interaction, I was just a dude on a screen. But I learned to say yes to most things, especially if someone just wants to hang out/bool. I got to work on emailing them back, clearing Cleo of any inappropriate implications and confirming I’d love to “bool” sometime on my way through town on one of my trips from Vermont down I-91 to visit my mother in New York City. 

When I arrived at their apartment sometime in June, I was met with four other people besides Cleo and Clara. There was Abigail, Mina, Madhura, and Sahana. And all seven of us ‘booled’ hard, we laughed, we watched an animated movie “Song of the Sea”, they drank Truly hard seltzers, I learned most of them were from Lexington, Massachusetts, and most were lesbians. At the end of a four hour “bool”, I parted company, euphoric and satisfied, that somehow during a global pandemic, I seemed to have managed to make some semblance of friends during this completely fucked up time. 

When August rolled around, I was faced with the choice of leaving Umass behind or returning to campus in Amherst, requiring me to move away from central Vermont. Cleo, Clara, and crew had left such an indelible impression on me, that it made moving to the area far more comforting to know I had friends already living there. As a loner with most of my family and friends either in the Boston area or Vermont, I knew that being in a new place was always exponentially easier to adjust to when friends are already slotted in.

Since then, Cleo’s left for grad school in Colorado, but with that simple phrase, “time 2 bool”, she opened the door to a chain of friends I’ve kept up with for the last year and a half in Amherst. They all seem like genuinely decent people: younger, smarter, far likelier to change the world for the better than I ever could. And I consistently return to a sense of gratitude. It’s a gratitude I have for the guts Cleo had to reach out in the void, to be the tipping point, and to allow me to be a part of her circle without judgment. 

Putting my major together has been like reconstructing Frankenstein’s monster. Crudely fused together with classes from five separate schools, dozens of credits have been left behind like body parts on the cutting room floor. Bloody stumps on rotted appendages, coagulating, scarring in the form of college loans. Perhaps, we could file my lost credits as ‘part of the journey’ toward my major, but the complicated path to what seems a straightforward end has been difficult to make sense of, much less integrate.    
The origins of majoring in English started in the summer of 2006. After failing twice to make life work in New York City post-high school, I got a job at a liquor store in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. The seven months of seven bucks an hour, living in my dad’s house, and generally being a drunken fuckup, had left me depressed, restless. Considering I spent the bulk of high school, ADD riddled, and thinking about anything other than school, my substandard transcript left little options for college. As a local, I thought UMASS-Boston might offer an easy bar for entry, and after a few semesters of good grades, a recent college transcript may help leverage a way to travel outside of the Greater Boston area to finish out my degree. I’d been obsessed with the idea of seeing America at the time, all of it, even Nebraska. Surrounded by trophies and pictures paying homage to past glories, and dead broke, I read through a hard copy of Lonely Planet’s cross-country road trip guide three times whilst milling in my dusty, childhood room. My friends had found employment out of the gate with their newfound college degrees. And there I was, without enough cash for a couple slices from the pizza shop down the street. How could I get to places like Las Vegas and San Francisco on this flat-lining trajectory? I figured school was a tangible way to do that. If I couldn’t transfer to another school in a different city besides the well worn, confusing streets of Boston, perhaps school would help open up jobs and earning potential on a bigger scale. 

I was accepted (thank god) to UMASS Boston and started summer intensive courses in 2006.  Long before I realized how much I actually disliked the process, I wanted to be a writer. Without fully realizing the jaded pain of voluntarily sitting and poring over a blank screen yet, I started slowly with two writing intensive English classes. As with most of the pivotal decisions involved with my major, it was made with simple logic: I figured English was the most approachable way to experience college courses. I knew the language, I knew how to write with relative clarity, and English didn’t offer equations, variables, periodic tables, laboratories, or anything else that would truly cause my head to pretzel with thought migraines.   

I stayed up until the AM the night before every paper, buzzed, stoned, irascible, furiously sputtering out words. I remember being quite proud of a paper I wrote about how violence in the media correlated with violence on the streets. In hindsight, the paper was trash (broad statements, little objective proof, filled with white ignorance, etc.), but I did well in the English classes, so I started to trust the process, as unhealthy as it was at the time. 

I applied to the New School University for the spring of 2007. I was rejected. I was devastated. I had worked so hard on the two essays for the application, and it all felt embarrassing at 22 years old, well past the phase my peers had gone through this process. But I was determined to leave Boston, and make New York work after my two failed attempts. So I applied for a loan and paid The New School to attend without formal acceptance. There, I took two night courses, “Writing from Personal Experience” and “Classic British Literature”, while working at a Wine Store fulltime in the Flatiron district. It all became too much for me. And while I aced “Writing from Personal Experience”, I was lagging in British Literature, where every book was Jane Eyre or David Coppefield, and five million pages. I burnt out after the semester, and decided to stick with full time work.

From there, it was an educational slumber between the years of 2007 – 2012 as I bummed around the wine sales floors and stock rooms of Manhattan for pittances. It was spring of 2012 when the defibrillator was applied to my college career. Like a magnet burrowed inside me, I was again drawn to creative writing. I figured English was a broader way to pursue writing, and no one actually needs a degree to write, but instead, to get them in the door of most companies that paid a decent wage. I applied and attended Hunter College, determined to finish my degree. With a focus on literature and creative writing with a gen-ed course sprinkled in here and there, I took part time classes in Hunter, until the Spring of 2015. Despite being a little over a year away from graduation, the lure of the degree had faded into the rearview, and the lure of a ‘career’ had materialized. While attending night classes, my day had been swallowed up by my job after my promotion to cellar manager. After one semester of trying to balance the duties associated with middle management and classes, I realized instead of excelling at anything, I was rendered mediocre at two pursuits. I decided to take a semester off to try to get my mind right, but it took much longer than a few months, several years actually. My job was taken over by the owner’s hands-on, Trump-idolizing insurance salesman douchebag son-in-law. (And then the country was taken over by Trump himself.) I lost my job, hit the bottle hard, got a different job in the same field, but had to travel to New Jersey monday through friday, so I hit the bottle harder, then went through a downfall which took me took dark places, and ended with me quitting drinking and by association, quitting a 13 year career in Wine and Spirits. As the fog settled over my mind, covid exacerbated the fog, and cost me a job I had at the time working in middle management in Massachusetts corporate cannabis. It was a merciful layoff, and during the cold winter of Covid, my college career was resurrected for the last time. 

My odyssey to this “final” semester (I’ll believe it’s over when it’s over) has been the most erratic, slipshod, start/stop experience of my life. The irony of trying to frame my major within the concept of integration isn’t lost on me. When all of it boils down to a simple decision made a year ago. After an audit of classes, and working with the English adviser, it became clear English with a focus on creative writing would present the least amount of remaining classes, and the quickest way to earn a degree, so we moved forward with that. 

In many ways, I never chose a major, my major chose me. I had always wanted to study the basics of English I didn’t appreciate in high school. I wanted to read more, fill my bookshelves to the ceiling with books. And most of all, I wanted to write. I wanted someone to force me. Not only to write for myself, but to write for others. So I chose English as a major. With hindsight, what I didn’t realize was that the greatest thing English offered me was the ability to understand. It helped me understand how language can be used to help others, to offer support without misunderstandings, and to offer love when physical boundaries are more fortified than ever. In contrast, more than ever now in 2022, I’ve also learned how it’s used to hurt others, to degrade and dismiss. It helps me understand the pressured moments in which words break down and (d)evolve into actions. There is no greater accolade, no plaudit of greater significance in my life than someone or something that offers me a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

I wasn’t quite sure what was going on with this email. How old is this? “July 16th, 2021”, so that’s like what, three weeks ago? Here I’ve been daydreaming of late summer beach days like a wastrel whilst looking for apartments in Biddeford, Maine, and this email has been sitting dormant in my UMASS inbox for three weeks?! “We are so excited to be welcoming you back for the Fall semester!” Wtf. What indication do you have that I’m coming back, UMASS? I haven’t even registered for a class. I’m moving to Maine and I’m gonna grow weed. I’d given up on the college covid experiment, I owed UMASS tuition from the 2021 spring semester, was all set to pay, and close the book on that chapter of my life. 

Comp Lit 351 (Crossing Borders in Israel/Palestine) broke me. I’d never written so much in such little time, I could have written a novel, at the very least, a novella, with the sheer volume of words that emerged from my bone dry body and mind in the Spring of 2021. It was not only the workload, but the content. Like so many things in this world, I knew what was right in my heart, but reality obviously reflected injustice. Paid work was so much easier than schoolwork on so many levels. And with the vaccine coming through, it seemed an appropriate time to reemerge from my grandmother’s basement and find a job. Maybe I’d finish up my Bachelor’s some other place, some other time, but a person must eat, and thus, it was time to get back to sacrificing my body and mind for the meat grinder gods of American capitalism.  

UMASS was set to unveil the veiled-up UMASK, returning to in-person classes. The one semester of virtual classes was an interesting experiment during an insane time in human history, which left me a bit more cynical and a bit more skeptical of authority. But now that UMASS was questionably insisting on sending kids back to the petri dish, vaccinated and masked, it ruled out my return. For a brief, impossible moment, put aside the Covid aspect; I lived in Central Vermont, how would I even get to Amherst 4-5 times a week without driving off I-91 into a ditch for sweet mercy? It’s just not practical. Time to go back to your roots: work, make money, call it quits on this self-indulgent, midlife “crisis-sy” pursuit of a higher education in your thirties. Who are you? Some sort of smarty pants? Some sort of book learnin’ man? No, you’re Tyler fuckin’ Raynolds, you’ve ascended to the lofty heights of American middle management without a degree, and you can do it again.

Sitting in my gaming chair and funded by pandemic assistance payments, my conviction towards finality gained traction. I was ready to cough up the $4k or whatever it was I’d accumulated in tuition, and be done with it. When I clicked on the link to “view/pay bill”, the balance was -$3,619. Wait… negative?! Does that mean they owe me money? How does that work? After some simple scanning it appeared I’d been offered a grant and a subsidized loan that would more than cover the arrears and tuition for the Fall semester.  Huh?? Is it ‘cause I’m old? Poor? What is it? Does it matter, Tyler?! You don’t have to shell out 4k!

While mentally high fiving myself for saving the cash, it dawned on me this arrangement hinged on my return to classes. And all of a sudden, like being dropped into a cold bed of water, my malleability evolved on the fly. How long would it take to graduate? Could you get an apartment with your credit, and lack of a job? I mean, how is this doable? Could you live in the Pioneer Valley for that long? Is it douchey to call it “The Pioneer Valley”? I’ve been told my constant stream of questioning can be annoying. My curiosity is bottomless, an endless pit that regularly kills normal conversations. People run hot and cold with it though. While annoying, some people enjoy that I seem genuinely interested in their lives. But it also consumes my own head. 

The practical and irrational questions may have streamed through my head in the silence of my grandmother’s basement, but I knew what I had to do. There wasn’t any drawn out decision, no hemming and hawing over other options. So few times in cutthroat American life, situations arise in which someone, or some entity, actually wants you around enough to offer you money to learn. How can I say no?    

I looked around my basement room like I had so many times before. Here’s where I lived while the world changed again. I’d been alone here for so long, and it was time to go. Some people, some bursars, UMASS or federal employees somewhere decided to open a door. This particular one led to Amherst, a place I never expected to be this late in life. But nothing good in my life has come from expectations. Over the past year and change, since the day I read that email, I moved to Turners Falls, and I’ve made friends for life. I’ve seen natural beauty beyond the previously fathomable. And most of all, I’ve found a place I’m wanted. When the year ends, another door is waiting. But for now, I’m whipping my Prius up and down route 53, back and forth to UMASS, savoring the unique singularity of this moment, taking my last rides around The Pioneer Valley.