Back To School
Erik Seadale

12gauge.com's managing editor goes back to school at Brooklyn  College--in archaeology.

 

It's a long ride out to Brooklyn College from my apartment in the city--57 minutes from my door to Urban Archaeology 203. I haven't explored the neighborhood yet so I don't have a favorite deli or coffee shop, and I don't know where the cafeteria is (if there is one). But I do have a minutes-shaving route through the parking lot and basement to my classroom.

Short of wearing a baggy pants and a backward baseball cap, I’ve done everything I can to fit in with my fellow students. In my Sierra Club knapsack (draped casually over one shoulder a la mode) is a banana, Poland Spring carbonated water, a notebook freshly stocked with loose-leaf paper and those trapper folders (though, unlike my youth, I’ve rejected the blandishments of Garfield, Donald Duck and the Tasmanian Devil in favor of spare and tasteful black).

As I’m an old hand at CUNY (City University of New York) schools, this being my third, I’m accustomed to the clerks giving conflicting, or false, or simply no answer at all to the simplest queries. I’m not surprised by the shabbily painted baby-blue and pink walls of the basement—it’s the same industrial paint and the same style (half-way up the walls) that I've seen in schools since the 70's. What’s more, I don’t attribute my difficulty establishing that I don’t have measles to dark forces conspiring against me. In fact, I feel fresh, and strangely young, among my fellow students, most of them a decade younger than myself. I love being in school. But it wasn’t always so.

After High School, I only managed to get into college because I tested well. I certainly didn’t get a scholarship. Though gifted with a physique more like a Greek god’s than anything else, I was a pretty crappy athlete; I like to think this is because my proud and independent nature rebelled against authority and team spirit. I abhorred all after-school clubs—nakedly ambitious apple-polishing for college.

After high school I went to a relatively traditional college: dorms, meal plans, and the rest of it. There I had a very good time and very poor grades. After a year and a half, I transferred my C average to my first CUNY, Hunter. I lived in a number of places while going there, even, for one semester in the dorms. I briefly went to college in Los Angeles (about which I remember very little, not even one amusing anecdote), before going back to Hunter where I stayed long enough to get a degree: Literature, American. Oddly enough, it didn’t prove that helpful in getting a job, and so, after a couple of years, I decided the thing to do was return to Hunter in order to obtain a Master in Literature, then, surely, success would be within my grasp. While there, I taught for the final two of my three semesters and realized that while being utterly jaded and cynical was entirely fitting for a tenured professor in his 70’s, it didn’t play so well coming from a pip-squeak younger than most of his students, no matter how long his beard was or how many leather patches he had on his elbows. So I dropped out without a degree.

A few years later I took the firefighters test, and though scoring in the top 1%, didn’t win the city’s "lottery" for the job. This misfortune made a deep impression on me, deep enough to drive me to the other extreme. I went to Queens (my second CUNY) to become a librarian (involved in the arts I hoped). I hated the courses, but persevered because I hadn’t finished my previous graduate degree. I stretched out this masochism for, again, a year and a half, and got my degree. I did work at the Metropolitan Museum (Greek and Roman department), where I had hoped to be involved in the de-acidification of old paper and the preservation of Museum’s books. But mostly I wore nice suits and genteelly did very little (they did have very nice staff parties there). Finally I ended up in a newspaper as a researcher in their library (formerly called the morgue) where there are very few books, but a lot of deteriorating clips and photos, and a couple of computers as well. The research can be interesting and I have some mobility; I’ve worked as a copy editor and written articles.

During the gaps between schools I passed up a number of opportunities and jobs because I knew I would be going back. Some of them well-paying union jobs. I also traveled a lot and read even more. I note this, hoping to convince that my life wasn’t all miserable—some parts were quite diverting—merely incompetently directed, like an Ed Wood film.

Now I've turned into the sort of student I used to hate years ago when I was a sleepy freshman. My attitude then towards older students was a vague unarticulated resentment against them for being older students. "Aren’t you kinda old to be in class?" These days I’m energetic and eager to please. "Ohhh, pick me, pick me. I'm ever so smart and I'll burst if I can't show you!" I figure that since I'm paying for the courses, I better get my money's worth.

Funny it should take me over thirty years to finally grow up. And what have I learned? I guess that if I ever have children (an increasingly unlikely prospect) I'll encourage them to take one, two, or ten years off before going to college.

A Few Words on the Title

The name "Silent City" has no particular connection to the contents of the column. The name simply popped into my head one night and I knew immediately it was the right name. I thought it sounded cool, and it also reminded me of a description of an eerie, ancient Egyptian necropolis as written by a writer of old school pulp fiction (doubly cool). But, as is so often the case, I felt I needed justification for what I had done after the fact. Why name it "Silent City"? Well, maybe the idea is to create a voice for those in the city whose voices are unheard, silent even? No, I certainly wouldn’t trust anyone who made that lofty a claim, and I am generous enough to concede that city’s press is already diverse enough to cover a wide range of views. Perhaps the title is not merely an ironic name for New York, but actually a metaphor for the individual who, within herself, contains a multitude of silenced voices (imagine a quiet schizophrenic). Readers will doubtless recall the Biblical demon who when asked to identify himself said "my name is Legion: for we are many."

Finally I came to my senses and realized that a name is a name is a name; it’s a nice sounding title and I’m leaving it at that.