Graduation Day, Part One: It was 1995. I was a newly re-minted undergraduate at Boston University, after having taken a few years off from my first attempt at a college education. Unlike my M.I.T. days, however, when generous financial aid and the kindness of my folks was keeping me in school and paying for my room and board, I was working a full-time job (at the bakery/coffeehouse I mentioned here last week) and actually doing all the required work for my classes, to boot. Hence, I was very much the zombie, especially for that first year back. After pulling an all-nighter I decided the next morning to take the Green Line to B.U. and not walk it from where I was living in East Cambridge, which I normally did since the MBTA's Green Line trolleys are notoriously slow and almost always overstuffed with people, although that morning I had actually scored a seat. I sat and half-dozed, watching the stops go by, when after a while it dawned on me that I wasn't seeing any of the familiar ones along Commonwealth Avenue. I'd hopped on the wrong line! The Green Line has four branches - the B, C, D, and E (don't ask me what happened to A) - and instead of boarding a B train for the B.U. and Boston College campuses I had gotten on the E line, which takes passengers out by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Mass College of Art, and the Longwood Medical Area, where I just so happen to work 9-to-5 these days. Back then, though, it was a no-man's land to me, and as I got off the train I realized that not only wasn't I sure where I was, but that I'd used my last dollar in order to pay my outbound fare, so I couldn't get back using the T even if I had wanted to. So I wandered around the extended campus of Harvard Medical School and the cluster of affliated teaching hospitals, looking desperately for some kind of reference point. Eventually I found one - the landmark CITGO sign near Fenway Park that graces Boston's skyline like a pulsating Cthonian eye. Using the sign as my guide, I followed a broad boulevard all the way back to familiar territory, after which I decided I was way too tired for a day of classes and headed back home (on foot, naturally!) in order to get some much-needed sleep.

Flash forward to today. I ducked out of work at 9:30 this morning in order to catch the Green Line back into town and back out again along the B line. My destination was the Registrar's office at Boston University, where my diploma was waiting to be picked up. I had just missed my trolley, so I hopped a bus line that ran parallel to the train and reversed course at Copley Square, outbound towards my old alma mater. I hadn't planned on getting my degree this way. When I had left B.U. for financial reasons back in the spring of 1998, I was working towards a combined undergraduate and graduate degree, a B.A./M.A. in Classical Studies, and although I didn't know it at the time, I'd actually completed all of the necessary coursework to garner the B.A., and was only one comprehensive exam away from the M.A.. Upon finally settling my financial differences with school a year ago, I had a decision to make - walk out with the finished Bachelor's degree, or study and pass the remaining Master's exam and end up with both. I chose to wait, study, and take the test. But finding time to knock back a graduate-level reading list is bad enough when you're taking a full load of classes, but it's even worse when you're working full-time during the day, teaching at night, and getting ready for (then having!) a baby on top of all that. My intentions were good, but I just never stuck to a study schedule, and as the deadlines for the exam came and went for the Winter and then the Spring, I thought I'd hunker down and take them next time around.

But then I realized something important: I didn't really care about the Master's degree. In order for me to move on in the field of Classics, a Ph.D. isn't just a good idea, it's a prerequisite; and my graduate credit would transfer into whatever program I got into. Not only that, but the recent unpleasantness here at the library have reminded me that it's time for me to move on, or at the very least, to set the process of moving on into motion at long last. Five years ago I came to the Med School by chance, just as I'd come there by accident three years before that on that sleep-deprived commute - the temp agency that I was working for at the time needed to fill a library position temporarily, and owing to my previous experience in the M.I.T. Libraries system, I was the best candidate for the job. Things are much different now. Whereas originally I came to the library seeking refuge (financial, academic, emotional), now I find it more and more like a cage. The view is nice, but there's nowhere to go. With my diploma finally... mine, not only would I cap off thirteen years of an on-again, off-again rollercoaster relationship with higher learning, but I'd also free myself to find out what comes next. There are a lot of possibilities now, and I like that. I like that a lot.