Cakes are being ordered this week.
I still remember the crimson raspberry filling of the Upper Crust cake my family cut for my graduation from Chico State two decades ago. As I meander through my neighborhood, not far from campus, I sense the edges of the celebrations unfolding — the journeys that are ending and also beginning, unveiling divergent paths and opportunities.
Now I sit in the tiny office (brimming with books) of my cottage at my great-grandmother’s desk giving feedback to my online college students for their final creative nonfiction pieces. I’m reminded each semester of the intangible rewards of teaching — of nurturing, in some small way, the journeys of students.
This season of completed (and incomplete) studies and quickly shifting weather led me to reflect on the way the closing of my own journey at Chico State launched me into unexpected but intensely rich adventures. My path didn’t take me where I thought I would end up. In the beginning, I didn’t even plan to go to Chico State — I had aimed for Seattle. I began as a major in English with a minor in French but turned into a double major in both because why not?
Should I ever walk into the cave of time (See “Choose Your Own Adventure,” Book #1) I would deliver a message to that younger version of myself: “Your journey is like no one else’s and there aren’t cookie cutter benchmarks you have to reach. Despite what society says, you don’t have to be married and have 2.5 kids by 35. You don’t have to land a tenure-track job in order to be ‘successful.’ You don’t have to own a house to be an ‘adult.’ You can live your dreams and shrug off the pressure to fulfill these ‘cultural standards’ on a prescribed timeline, because your journey is your own — and that’s the glorious beauty of it.”
No adventure always goes according to plan (See “The Hobbit” and “The Neverending Story”) but there’s something to be said for making the decision to hold fast to the heart’s dreams, to laugh when things don’t work out, to take risks, and to listen to my dad who pushed me to finish my Ph.D. when I said I couldn’t because the grief of a broken dream was tripping me up.
One radiant revelation is the idea that it’s OK not to be certain about what one wants to “do” or “be” in our early 20s. Is there some rule that dictates that the major we choose as undergrads is the area we’ll pursue for the rest of our lives? My passions were stories and travel and history and while I thought being a professor of children’s literature was the golden dream, that’s not actually where I ended up. What I’m doing now feels much more expansive and different than that, but perfect for who and where I am.
If I inserted the map of my journey through the “life program” with cookie cutter criteria, the system goes haywire and starts to overheat. It doesn’t compute. I’m glad.
It would require multiple cups of coffee and blueberry danishes from Tin Roof for me to tell you all that transpired those years after Chico State. I went from living in southwest London to teaching (with some trepidation) community college students as a 24-year-old in Northern California to moving to Pennsylvania for a full-time university gig without ever having set foot in the state, to getting a Ph.D., to teaching English to middle schoolers in South Carolina, to surviving various blizzards in a small vacation cottage on Cape Cod while teaching online (the power never went out!), to running book fairs while working as an elementary school librarian at a Reggio-Emilia school in Beacon Hill, Boston and living for a time in a house outside the city built in 1630.
Chico State set me on this colorful trajectory because Chico State gave me London semester. I fell in love with England, returning again and again after living there twice, and this study abroad sparked a fire in me for exploring the world that hasn’t diminished.
I’m thankful. My years at Chico State set me up for fascinating and life-changing, but unexpected adventures, and I certainly wouldn’t trade those for anything. Not even for what seems to be the “perfect plan.”
