A New Adventure...

7.31.24

“Would anyone sign up for this?” I wondered, making my way up the stairs toward the old classroom. In my third year of my PhD in Theatre at the University of Minnesota, this would be my first time leading a college classroom. My first time sculpting a syllabus. Course titles were just then, in 1993, starting to paint themselves in wit and exclamation points to lure students. I called mine “Older Women and the Arts.” I went old school. 

Would anyone show up? 

I rounded the corner into the room. There were two surprises. First, the classroom was full. Second, they were of all ages. There was a cluster of “traditionally” aged college students on the left and a cluster of mid-life students on the right. And in the back, right in the middle, with a short, white shock of hair, there was a woman in her 80s, whom I would later learn, held a PhD in English. 

I was all of 27. 

Tomorrow, after 25 years as a professor, I retire into the life of an Older Woman in the Arts. 

I feel like I am climbing the steps again, into a new experience. But this is a much larger classroom and I am not the teacher.

After 25 years as a scholar of Age Studies and the Arts, what lessons will I take with me?
How will I gently shape my own syllabus to guide this next phase of life? 

I really, really wish I had a whiteboard full of bullet points. Maybe I will with time to reflect - but right now, I don’t. All I have now, as I stare at the official retirement date tomorrow, is one bullet-point, inspired by the older woman in that first classroom: 

Frame life as learning. 

Keep doing it. 

Every moment of every day.  

Even if everyone else is 50 years younger than you.  

Even if you know that you are packing more knowledge than the person standing at the head of the classroom.  

Open every moment to learning. 

Keep a learning journal.

After the champagne toasts from my PhD committee members, I hopped in a car and drove west for 6 weeks. Through mountains and valleys, the long miles of road and sky helping to molt the skin of outside expectations. “What do I want to do from here?” was the question beneath the wheels. In a few days I’ll start the engine of another road trip, this one up into the the more rounded mountain tops of the east coast, from my new home in GA up to Maine and back again. The same question is in the tank. “What do I want to do from here?”  

A learning trip - for a new phase of learning. 

Away we go!

anne, smiling, toasting with a glass of wine.