Back To School

Barley, a dog, peers from the hallway into an unlit classroom.

The adage that you can ‘never go home again’ is oft-repeated, and I think it’s worth reflecting on. When we leave the nest to live a new life in a new place, doing so changes us, and the places we grew up change in our absence. As Tim Rogers puts it, “Places do not remember us.” But what’s even more dramatically true is that you can never go back to school again. One’s childhood, at least, has some sprawl to it, stretching over years. We rarely spend more than a handful of years in a given educational context, and education (if it’s doing anything right at all) transforms the person receiving it.

So I will never again sit in a classroom as a student, not as I was. Those classrooms remain, but those classes are gone, as is the person I was and the era within which I was embedded. And something I’ve learned in that time, and continue to learn: How narrow and fleeting this sliver that is “today.”