navel-gazy memories

I know that Proust was supposedly triggered by the smell of madelines (a type of small cake).

For me, one of the strange memory triggers I have is Ralph Vaughn Williams, "The Lark Ascending." Not that i have specific memories of hearing it played somewhere, it's just that the piece is so evocative that it reminds me perfectly of a moment from my past. It's playing right now on the Internet station I listen to.

When I was in high school (I went to a private high school, so the teachers could develop courses that involved their interests, rather than the strict curriculum), I took a class called Natural History. It was actually more like a very basic-level ecology class: we did field sampling, and did some trapping experiments (mice), things like that. I remember one day - I think the teacher got permission to get us out of class? Or maybe had us show up to school an hour early? I don't remember but I do remember we went out looking for birds - it was a bright clear spring day, a little bit of wind, and we went out into the wild area back behind the campus (the school had been well-endowed in the past, and had bought up a lot of the land around it before that land got built up - we were actually on the cross-country course, but it was huge and untended and not the season for cross-country, so we were alone. And we climbed up onto the biggest hill there, and looked down on the rest of the field. I remember the wind ruffling my hair about (I had just decided to start growing it long at that point). And it just was one of those moments of peace. One of those moments where I felt like, "This is what I want to be doing with my life" - both being out in the field doing research, and also, maybe, teaching, like my teacher was teaching us now.

And every time I hear that piece, it reminds me of that moment. And it makes me take a little bit of a deep breath, and remind myself that even in the midst of e-mails about "I got a C in your class. Is that really the grade you intended to give me?" and other things, there's still some germ of that old enjoyment, that old sense of "this is what I'm supposed to be doing" there.

Oh, I don't get out nearly enough - and anyway, the climate I'm in now is frequently too hot and humid for fieldwork to be fun - and teaching gets you less respect than I envisioned it would (I had a very "Mr. Chips" view of what being a teacher would be like, I guess). But still, I guess I can't really think of another job that would be better.

Another thing: I'm working on the tail end of some research right now. It involves working with a microscope in my office (they are resurfacing floors elsewhere in the building, and I need computer access because I'm using some image-analysis software). My office smells like the preservative used on these samples. So now I feel like a "real" scientist...the whole preservative smell also reminds me of my days in Natural History and my days in Plant Systematics and classes like that.

(And you know? Damn, but I miss being a student - just having that single focus of studying and learning. Living in a small apartment where I didn't have to do yardwork or even much housework, and I could devote nearly all my time to just learning stuff. It's not quite the same when you're doing it as an autodidact adult and trying to learn from books or something - I actually miss going to lecture and taking notes, and going to lab and trying to draw stuff from the specimens.

I think I also miss that I had relatively little "responsibility" - I didn't have people requiring stuff of me the way I now do. It's to the point where I cringe when my office phone rings because I expect it will either be a disgruntled student, a frantic student, or an administrator wanting me to do something for them.

I think maybe what I'll do in retirement? Find a place that lets me go back to school and just learn stuff. Take the geology classes I wanted to take but never had time to. Take calculus again. Take stuff like Ichthyology that I never had time to take in school.)