The Wikiness

It’s “back to school time,” late September, and I feel nostalgia for all those autumns I bravely buckled up, put on the uniform, bid farewell to summer leisure reading and reconciled myself to another year of Education-ese. All teachers understood the calendar: in August or September, get your s-word together. You’re working for the school board now. Adapting to my employer’s calendar, I put aside personal projects I’d nurtured as they emerged over the summer like unplanted flowers. Such sacrifice the public good required.

I do not miss the petty department and administrative struggle. But I fondly recall the excitement of meeting classes, the joy of getting to know a whole new crop of adolescents. As the leaves fell outside, each classroom developed its own character, a melding of personalities assigned to the seats in front of me. As the weather turned cold, I sighed in the warm indoors with kids from crazy homes, who felt the same about school as I had: here at last, a place to breathe and maybe even be one’s self. 

I write this late on a Friday afternoon, the same point in the week when, several years ago, I’d be looking for my “angry fix,” for somatic release. Were I still sociable after a week of teaching, I’d meet up with a dozen or so similarly inclined teachers at the Lunar Tap, Villa Park’s original brewpub. There we’d drink pints of freshly brewed ale, eat pretzels or something less healthy, and after enough beer, vent about the job, and take out our frustrations on the dartboard or the jukebox, which the Lunar turned up loud, so the lonely regulars wouldn’t have to converse with anyone or be heard muttering in their beers. 

Now look at me. It’s Friday Happy Hour and I’ve spent the afternoon in a timeless flow between house and garden, making healthy meals and finding new ways to nurture my growth. Instead of putting them away, this autumn I tend to each of my creative projects like plants in a garden, and each offers me fruit.

One of my projects, this memoir, offers me the fruit of grateful self-acceptance. Each chapter challenges me into a searching, fearless moral inventory. As I strive to understand my former selves, I learn to accept them with love and forgiveness, not the judgment I used to cast on them. In late 2022 I joined a group of 12 or so writers brought together by author and writing teacher Beth Finke. We Zoom each week to share 500-word essays, challenging and inspiring each other, and making bold to drop our facades and let whatever “it” it is that haunts our memories come out. 

I have never been in such a community of creative, mutually-supportive adults. It enlivens and broadens me. Each week, I get critical feedback on my skills and learn from the varied, interesting lives of my classmates, who Zoom from all over the world.

School goes back into session without me, and now I follow my own curriculum, finding teachers wherever I look.