When I used to work at the Seneca Center for Children and Families, I spent a good part of my last year wondering about my last day. My friend Kevin was going back to grad school and gave plenty of notice and prepared the kids and they said their goodbyes and had a party and closure and all the right things. It’s true that he’d sat out part of the worst parts of the late spring with a random non-kid injury, but he still took the time to do it the right way. I admired it and wondered if I’d be so lucky.
Shortly after, we went out to camp, which really tested my faith and patience. And that’s when I started wondering how I would depart from the job. The way they handled camp (for another post sometime) converted me from seeing Seneca as my destination job indefinitely to starting to look for a way out. It had been almost exactly a year by the end of camp, right on cue.
I thought about my own departure and when to pull the trigger. Discussed it most every day with Kevin’s replacement, Cameron. Brought it up at staff meetings, a naive call that may have been a mistake. Held on through the toughest, seeing it as a personal challenge. The fire extinguisher incident, the clear warning, the bright neon sign to get out. Heedless, I held out for danger, for real exposure, for crisis. And then the dragging postmortem, trying to come to staff meetings while I fence-sat about still (!) possibly going back, weeping openly outside the door, and the awkward meeting, and finally (sweet relief) the decision to just cut bait. To quit again. To settle into my comfortable pattern of departing in a ball of flames.
You see, I attended 13 schools in my youth and between one of my preschools and high school, I didn’t leave one of them at the regularly scheduled or appointed time. I closed out the year properly, on the scheduled last day, in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, but those were at three different schools (three different states!) and the 2nd grade was my third enrolled school (plus some homeschooling time) that year. In 1st grade, I knew I wouldn’t be back, and the last day of school tugged at my teardrops as I bid farewell to barely made friends for the foreign sounds of Washington DC, following in my own father’s footsteps as he repeated his history. In 2nd grade, I had no idea what was next, but had a pretty good idea that this was it after such an infinite year of upheaval. I was back after 3rd grade, but had no way of anticipating Broadway and the crises that would follow. The day of being swung around and stuck in a locker by nemesis Rick and the subsequent yoink – no goodbyes, no closure, just the vision of the hallway that would haunt my dreams as I was carried out, eyes full of sadness. The endless meetings at CCC leading to similarly unceremonious departure with dubious W’s. The Broadway deja vu at Star of the Sea three years after, almost to the day, when my parents and the priest found the Columbine-style Kid Pix aimed in my direction. Yoink again, a quick goodbye, but this time I knew to get addresses of friends (and I hadn’t had friends at Broadway anyway, save the short twins Matt and Mark perhaps).
The point of all this? By the time I got to the Academy’s Senior Project and subsequent graduation, I was convinced that something would fail. That some crisis would descend unpredicted to keep me from walking, from diplomas, from the peaceful transfer of life on to the next step. As if to create my own crisis, I turned in my Senior Project final paper, the only mandate of said project to earn graduation, with just an hour to spare, having started it at 1:00 that morning. But I donned the black robes and the goofy hat and it all happened. And again four years later, against all odds, another manufactured crisis (my arts requirement grade), and yet I overcame my seeming destiny to walk and receive paper.
And then a soft sweet compromise, meaningless in some ways, as I departed libraries to get married and find meaningful work. My shock at being given goodbye parties and parting gifts. So this is what it’s like to leave properly. Only for it to go down in flames again, the old standby, within two years.
The point of all this? That as I look ahead to my goodbye party three days hence and final day at Glide two days thereafter, I am flooded with memories of how things have ended in the past. As much as I have resented being tied to schools and jobs over the years, they have truly defined almost my entire life to this day, for better or worse. And as a writer, a reader, an observer of humanity, I probably care about endings more than any other critic. And so I face another just ahead and can’t help but wonder what crisis might raise its specter to rob me of another properly done departure.
I don’t have the same faith in this unpredicted crisis that I did on the eve of high school graduation. I have learned something from it all working out in Albuquerque, in Waltham, even the small touching farewells in Walnut Creek and Fairfield. The outpouring of love and support from Glide and its staff since my announcement two months ago has convinced me that, even more than those deadline-pushing graduations, I have finally figured out how to make an exit. Knock on wood, fingers crossed. For someone who has made a lifetime of being a quitter, three decades is a pretty low and slow learning curve. But this week, I’ll take it. I hope.
