Ended a seven-year career at the U.
yesterday.  It’s been more like twelve years, really, considering I showed
up back in ’92 with a rusted Chevy station wagon, a few duffels of crap, a pile
of books, and a basketball.  Time flies.

Now, I’m technically on vacation.  I’ve still got a few course
development projects floating around, a house to sell, boxes to pack, a trip to
NY next weekend, a mini-vacation at Drummond Island (Gem of Huron!), and hearty hunk of familiarizing and forethought for teaching and
studying at SU this fall. 

Nothing much has wrapped up smoothly in these last few weeks.  We
haven’t hired my successor at work, which means all of the systems are rather in
limbo–trembling toward collapse b/c nobody’s at my desk to hold them up. I’d
say it’s like force and energy to a black hole, but I was relieved the other day
to hear that Steven Hawking revisited his theories on the absolute envelopment
of black
holes into nothing.  Turns out it’s not nothing, but
something.  Radiation.  Histories.  Now we’ll need a new metaphor
for totalities of loss.  In the meantime, to the hole!

And no, I’m not drunk from celebrating the end (beginning!).  In fact, despite
sipping down a few Corona’s last evening at a kind, generous going away party, I
left feeling kind of sober about my departure.  All along I’d been looking
ahead, feeling happy about the switch.  But folks started filing in, eating
chicken wings, smiling and laughing, and showing their incredibly warm, friendly
best.  Before long, we shuffled to P.’s basement, where they played a
documentary put together by M. and E., a flattering splice-mix made up of
interviews of many of the people I’ve known, music, video of buildings (like
Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel, where D. and I got married last summer, like the
Breckon Sports Center, where Ph. hasn’t missed a basketball camp in four years,
like the ill-furnished offices and classrooms in Copley-Thaw Hall where I sat in
graffitied desks while sorting out King Lear, Frankenstein, and Go
Down, Moses all those years ago).  Which way to look,
Gloucester?  

I’m not so much down as adrift, reminiscent, deeply affected by the scene of
tribute, memories, folks saying goodbye like it’s permanent and final. 
Like I’m off to outer space.  Tinges of guilt come and go, too, from the
everyday reminders that I’m stepping out of a stabilizing role in a place where
stability is cherished, where a fair amount of my day to day work has kept
things normal-seeming: web
upkeep, news releases, photography, statistical compilation and reporting,
hiring and policy development, compliance, drug testing, publication design,
event coordination (halftime shows and such), work-study supervision, screening warm-up music.  On
Monday?  TBA.

There’s not much of a point to this.  It’s all just to say that I didn’t
realize the scale of what I was voluntarily leaving behind in KC until everybody
started gangpiling me with memories, hugs, sad faces.  Why blog it?  I
want to remember.  There’ll be time in the next few years when I’ll want to
recall July 17, the day I keyed notes about the 16th, when I’ll want to jog
fond memories of all the resilient friends and colleagues along the way. 
I’ll just click, click, and there it’ll be.  Right where I put
it.  And the video; I like to think I’ll be able to convert it to .mov or
.mpg, so it can fill a place here as well.