Three times I talked to her today; Nancy, my best friend who has just moved to New Hampshire from Massachusetts and between the telephone and e-mail, we’ve kept in near-daily contact through decades and many moves and many, many changes.
She understands the stress I’m feeling, and understands the need for getting out from under it. She too had gone back to college after many years and though I spoke of needing now a cabin in the woods she told me it was likely just the opposite I needed; to get back in with people, that I seemed happiest in the years I took in getting a degree. It’s different for the younger student, anxious to leave school behind and jump into the world that it has prepared them for, while I am working backwards; jaded by the world and need return to learning as if to reincarnate.
What for? I asked. It’s really much too late to do me any good to take it further. For self-esteem and focus, she said. It will get my mind off other things (she knows my obsessive nature). She understood the separation pangs that left me working in my shop with mostly only Willie’s voice for company and the occasional interaction with a customer that has me hungrily jabbering as they try to leave.
Graphics, I think. Something that I could use and something I know I’m trying to teach myself anyway. And I think that if I don’t sign up at the same college this semester I’ll lose my student status and have to readmit. While at the university I couldn’t take just a class or two and have no time or inclination now to take it on full time.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll take the plunge. Or maybe not.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology