A New Life

I found myself in a new life.

I’d lived all my life on the east coast, first in various Upstate New York locales, then for seven years in Baltimore. Most of that time, I’d fancied myself a writer, and worked at it with varying degrees of intensity, while trying on different hats in college residence life and working in management for an academic summer camp.

I decided to leave all of that behind to make the writing my primary focus. So I applied to MFA programs and found myself in the little college town of Corvallis, Oregon, three thousand miles removed from anywhere I’d stayed for longer than a couple-week business trip or vacation before.

But that wasn’t the only change. In making the move, Heather and I had chosen to transition our long-distance romance into a live-in relationship. And I wouldn’t only be writing, but teaching writing to undergraduates, while taking workshops and craft-oriented classes.

I started reading A New Life, a novel by Bernard Malamud. One of the second-year students had advised us to familiarize ourselves with Malamud, the author of The Natural and plenty of other books and short stories, because he was one of the biggest deal canonical writers who had worked for a time at Oregon State. I discovered A New Life as a book critically considered about equal parts fiction and autobiography, rooted in Malamud’s experience, not unlike his protagonist, of moving west to Oregon to teach writing at a university quite a bit like Oregon State, in a town quite a bit like Corvallis. It all seemed like a primer for the experience ahead of me.

Amidst all of this change and all of this newness, everything seemed to crystallize one night, the weekend before classes started for me as both student and teacher. Heather had gone out of town and I attended a faculty mixer where professors intermingled with instructors and us graduate teaching assistants who’d be doing much the same work at a cut-rate salary but with our tuition covered. This mixer was one of the fanciest affairs I’d see in Oregon, with wine and hors d’oeuvres at a loft bar with space to step outside and oversee Corvallis.

After the mixer, we went out. I didn’t get drunk like some of my new friends did, but sampled well whiskeys and felt a sensation not unlike when I was in college. No burden of a 9-5 office job, surrounded by young people, and all of us just starting to get to know one another. And we were talking not only about travel adventures and hometowns and craft beer, but about literature.

Around three in the morning, I found myself riding in a car I’d never been in, in a state I’d never been in just a couple weeks earlier, wedged into the backseat alongside the bodies of three other people I’d just met, no seat belts, as we took a ride back up the hill to the apartment complex where we all lived. It was autumn, but it was still hot so we had all of the windows down.

Stopped at a crosswalk, a cluster of college kids stumbled across the street, one of them singing, one of them walking backwards as he continued a conversation with someone they’d left behind at the curb. We laughed about how young they seemed.

And as the car lurched into motion, I thought of the absurdity of that. That here I was, up well past my bedtime and buzzed on bourbon, riding through a college town like this. I called out to no one in particular, “I’ll be your teacher Monday morning!” It got a collective laugh from the car.

And I got back to my quiet, dark apartment, exhausted, yes, but also so ready for what this new life might bring.