back to school

I have spent nearly my whole life either enrolled in a school or working for one.

So, August is always the beginning of a new year for me—the hours of anticipation, the new space full of new supplies, the fresh start, the fear of failing, the return to routine and assignments and work.

I’m resurfacing three of my essays that live in that back-to-school world and the anxieties of beginning again:

• un-fair pigment: red hair, pale skin and mercurochrome
  life as a redhead in the summer of 1972
• entrance day, 1976
  driving across Kansas with my parent to my first day in the Jesuit novitiate
• meeting someone in new york
  finding myself lost for good in the best city to do so