Friday, September 4, 2009

Big Chief

First week of school, and I've been thinking how, for more-or-less fifty years, the school calendar's provided a structure to my year, that first week of September (give or take a bit) marking a new start, a re-energizing, a setting out. I took a few years off, in my twenties, doing other things, but for nearly all my life September's been the time of fresh beginnings. By now it feels like the academic calendar inheres in the structure of time itself; first shift in the weather, I want some new shoes, a new bag to carry my books and papers to school. As a kid in Memphis and Tucson, I bought big fat-lined pads of paper; I liked that they were called "tablets" because it echoed the slabs of Babylonian clay in my favorite archaeology book. This semester I have a new laptop, courtesy of Rutgers, but the pleasure is essentially the same: something fresh and pretty much empty to write on.

3 comments:

Mim said...

I'm no longer teaching but fall still feels like a new beginning. It's the change in the weather and the stab of expectation.

julia said...

Ah "tablets" - my dad being a prof, life was always defined in semesters, not seasons: and still is. I wrote my first stories on the yellow copy paper he bought home from the univ stockroom, bad daddy, he also lov'd "tablets" and had apparently no problem in purloining and distributing writing materia from the stockroom to his scribbling wee ones.

New shoes all around!

Unknown said...

i wish you a good semester—

you obviously limit your blog-list links,

so i'm honored to be on it, but you have my old defunct one on there—

could you please update it to:

http://billknottpoetry.blogspot.com/

...
thanks and best wishes