Wanna Be Starting Something

It has been eight years since I attended an fully operationalized educational institution.

I have attended four colleges of various types, sizes, and degrees of excellence, counting the deep-fried Southern Baptist university I first tried (and flunked out), the community college where I bode my time while living at home and getting my act together, the respectable second-tier urban university where I finally finished my bachelor's degree, and the graduate school of art where I ran up 90% of my current debt.

And now, I'm at number five. (I don't add the clinic where I studied psychoanalysis to the list, as it would be unrecognizable to anyone as a "school.") I enrolled this week in the Building Trades program at my hometown's technical and community college.



At no other institution than a community college does gratuitous dabbling in intellectual enrichment collide so regularly and obviously with the determined pursuit of a sustainable life, a living, an escape from misfortune or vice, a second start after the first turned sour or ran out of steam.

I couldn't say for sure where I place myself on the spectrum of motivations, nor is it easy to look around my new Carpentry 1 cohort and pin down their various attractions to this class. I look back at my own starts and false starts, and I think I can relate to some of the urgency, the unsettledness, the shadow of failure that threatens to darken the whole future if you don't keep improvising, trying, planning, regrouping, and moving forward forward forward.

I am cheered by my own path since then, with retrospective satisfaction, because the years have softened most of my regrets, and youth looks to me like an absurd dream, all amusement instead of horror.

My class has started with 25 students, about half of them women (which, I am ashamed to say, is a big surprise to me), and representing the distribution of age and race one would expect to see in the whole broad populace.

There is the 19-year-old, twitchy, hyperactive towhead who came to class 20 minutes late with a black eye. It's easy to guess what he's doing here, and undoubtedly easier still to get an honest answer if one were to ask directly. He is gregarious, pitiable, and impossible to disparage.

There is the 60-year-old Thai man whose accent dumbfounds our instructor. (There is almost nothing more difficult for American ears and brains to decipher than Thai-accented English.) He is small and moves with difficulty. I wonder if he will be physically able to work the wood by hand, or control a board through the planing machine. He could very conceivably be taking the class to fill his retirement leisure time, or just as easily to build fixtures for his own toy store, or help his daughter build a shed or adventure playground in the back yard.

There are two women who are 30ish, friends from some other class or classes. They are athletic, pretty, smart, and outgoing. They asked direct questions that proved they understood more carpentry vocabulary than I do. (I am still unclear on the equivocal rip.) During the break they had a voluble conversation about doctors' offices where they are . . . patients? technicians? doctors? They laughed and chatted while the rest of us stood about in uncomfortable silence, hoping for the instructor to resume his lecture about trees and moisture, so we could look at the white board instead of one another or our phones. In any case, these women have been taking community college classes for a while, and are at ease in this milieu, and that is very encouraging.

I wish I had been more outgoing last night. I only individually and directly met one other student, a tall Latin American who is almost definitely the branch manager of a bank or else a Legal Aid attorney - something solid and respectable. Stifled by life in front of the monitor, wanting to exercise both brain and hands in a new way. Unfortunately, he exemplified the sycophancy of the "non-traditional" student I remember from my own first time in community college. On the other hand, if he hadn't been so eager-to-please, I'd have met no one at all.