Last spring, I graduated for the last time in the foreseeable future. I have been going around collecting degrees for the last couple of decades, and each time I finish one, I feel like more of a beginner than when I started. Repetition might have taught me to expect this. Instead, I am surprised, again, to come to Oregon and feel more like a junior in high school than a Dr. Gehring.
One reason for this is the nature of knowledge: the more you gather of it, the less you realize you have. Another reason is that I did my doctoral work in a writerly way, reading slowly rather than broadly (except during exams). One of my committee members said, “You know, it’s interesting-—all the books on your lists are beautifully written.” Without realizing it, I had chosen my sources in part for the quality of their sentences. This is a fun way to do research, but it is not the way to arrive at the end feeling like an expert who has covered all possible angles.
Another reason is that two of the main things I am doing (helping Lucy grow up well, and writing) are things that do not care about academic degrees. Toddlers are oblivious (though Lucy did love the hat), and writers and their institutions are often actively suspicious of degrees. I will have to show that I can actually do good silly dances, appreciate the fascinatingness of red berries, and do a good job being patient with boxes of unrolled dental floss (or get them out of reach). I will have to write good sentences and put them together into good paragraphs and send them to magazines with cover letters that judiciously avoid mentioning what I’ve done with the past fifteen years of my life. I will have to start, again, at the beginning.
Maybe the most obvious reason I feel like a junior in high school is that that is what I was when I first lived in this state, and city, and house. My strongest memories here are the last year and a half of high school-—a time, mostly, of lostness. Until I met my one, dear friend Sandy, if people asked me who I hung out with, I scrambled to remember the names of my chemistry lab mates. I had joined the school at the beginning of junior year, moving from Germany and coming in so late that I missed the qualifying tests for honors English and spent a semester watching Monty Python on witches and penciling in the blanks in interminable packets of questions about minor details in The Scarlet Letter. If I succeeded at finding a group to sit with at lunch, I struggled to follow their conversations and then, sensing their irritation with my constant requests for information, lapsed into silent incomprehension. Who’s that? What’s that? What does that mean? How do you do that? I sounded pretty much like an American by accent, but American teenage life felt untranslatable to me. I hadn’t found my way much into listening to music, so I had only perfunctory familiarity even with the bands that were popular in Germany. But I could keep up a polite conversation about Roxette or Ace of Base; I knew the proper tone in which to mock David Hasselhoff, and what kind of social group you probably belonged to if you listened to ska. The Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins and REM, however, meant nothing to me. And it was not forgivable to ask “who’s that band?” when “Losing My Religion” played during physics lab. Or to ask “what’s a no. 2 pencil?” when reading the instructions on my first Scantron multiple-choice test. Or to walk down the hall slowly, staring at the three numbers on the slip of paper the administrator had handed me, and have no idea how they were supposed to lead to an open locker.
The high school memories in this house mean that I have to make it a constant practice to remind myself that I know how to do some things. I will be able to find the café for the writers’ meetup. I will be able to make small talk if I visit a moms’ group. I will be able to negotiate with the daycare owner. I can make a joke and people may think it is funny. I know what Arnold Schwarzenegger means to Americans. I still like books better than music, read slowly, and struggle to keep up with the news. But even if most of them do not live in this city, I have friends here now. And they know all the things. One of them turns on music and we have dance parties in the kitchen (that one also knows all the Back to the Future movies by heart). One loves opera arias. One says that Sufjan Stevens sounds like the mental soundtrack for her brain, two of them just flew across the world to visit, another sends me playlists of German children’s music, and thanks to another one, I know the Velvet Underground is the favorite band of many epic indie groups.