Finding My Hogwarts
HARRY POTTER: (about Hogwarts) It's not the place you left, you know. It's not the same.
LUNA LOVEGOOD: Neither am I.
---------------
One of my graduate school classmates let me know that the Machine Shop at the University of Maine is being torn down. I found this out when I pointed out that the trees around Boardman Hall were cut down. It took me a while to notice the change, because I almost assumed the trees were there, and that assumption didn't feel right. That building has been at the school for an eternity. I remember walking between Boardman and that Machine Shop to find shelter from the brutal winter winds that swept through campus in February, or to feel the breeze under shade in October. In a way, that lot will always have that old Machine Shop, even as it is razed to the ground and a new building takes its place.
It is my second year of graduate school and the University of Maine is a different place from what it was in 2006, the year I graduated, swearing never to return. I still know the campus like the back of my hand. I can get to any one building from any one building. I know where 101 Bennett or 412 York or 314 Patch are. I remember where to park, how to take the turns and when to avoid the rushes to class. I still order egg salad on spinach wraps with pickles at the Union Marketplace and it tastes exactly the same. Some things have not changed.
But the changes are innumerable, and one most of all: I am different. I remember most of my years in Orono as ones where I was lost, adrift in the adult world, trying to find out who I was and why I was and where I was and where I was going. Now every grain of my time is precious and its expenditure feels strangely urgent; I set every priority for my visits carefully. I arrived in Orono feeling like going to college was not a choice; now I go and it's a place I want to be for as long as I can. I feel the confidence of finally having done well academically and having expertise I didn't have before. In my undergraduate years, my confidence was just a front for what was actually potential. Now, I have walked that personal and professional road only to find myself back where I started, now as a group of students in the Masters of Science in Teaching (MST) program.
The campus is indeed different. A memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. rests at the heart of the campus. The school has finally painted the panels on Shibles Hall from an ugly shade of blue to a better matching (yet equally ugly) brown. The school literature on everything (relationships, academics, sexual assault, queer identity, campus life, student activities, you name it) reads differently. The old arcade is now a banking center. There's a list of fifty things to do before you graduate in the Memorial Union that celebrates everything great about this place.
It's different, and it's still home, years later.
I reflect on this now because even this year is different. I am on a different track from my cohort in the MST program at UMaine, and eventually, the community of learners and people I've found and feel part of in this place will outpace me. I'm part time, so I'm completing classes more slowly and won't finish at the same time. Even though we're all working and still in the program, at some point, this community will evaporate and be gone. Where my time in Orono before felt like an eternity, I recognize that my time here now is flying before me rapidly and that I have to make the most of it.
---------------
I've spent my life looking for community and trying to define what it is. I think I've shoehorned myself into so many that didn't fit me (or me them) that at some point my view of what community is became distorted and off-base. I finally have an idea of this now.
The RiSE Center hosted a cookout last week, and I was excited to tell everyone that I was finally going to become an office rat. Working on graduate school assignments and readings is too hard to do at home or at school. Consequently, I chose to put down twenty dollars deposit on two keys to Estabrook Hall. I got there to find that my original desk had been reassigned, so I got a desk in another office. It felt good, but not quite in the way I thought it would. I remember thinking that getting an office on campus was a sign of status, and that was the only reason I wanted one. Back in my undergraduate years, becoming a graduate student was a vain, egotistical, greedy desire, something that I could say that I did because it made me feel important. Now, it represents a chance to do what folks in my community do: their best work in education with the support and care of one another. I realized, though, as all the MSTs in my cohort sat around a table, eating, laughing, telling inside jokes and sharing advice for another semester, that I had found a place to be that was a community, and that I didn't need the office to find it. I simply needed to be the person I have spent all my life becoming.
This, I've come to learn, is the definition of community: People with shared values and goals who support each other in achieving them and living them. I think I needed to be different to find my way to one again. Now I'm in it and ready for it, even as it speeds by me.
---------------
Luna and Harry exchange the words at the top of this post over Dobby's grave in what is apparently a deleted scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. I have always been a massive fan of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. I related at one time to their hidden natures and to their own deaths, to their senses of selflessness and valor and kindness. I felt like they were characters that represented me. Now I take this singular line from an incredible and underrated character as my absolute favorite from the whole story. Why?
In the Hogwarts epic, the place changes, even as it remains the same. The ancient Gothic castle, for all its menacing and magical contents, changes year in and year out. The members of its community (mostly of Gryffindor House, of course, but some others, too) resiliently rise to meet all of its challenges throughout the story. Of course, they must change in order to do that. They have to be different, bigger, braver people. They have to grow up and become who they are. Luna Lovegood is simple and direct in her expression of what people must do to belong. That idea, that the place I am in is not the same, and neither am I, is one that has brought me peace.
LUNA LOVEGOOD: Neither am I.
---------------
One of my graduate school classmates let me know that the Machine Shop at the University of Maine is being torn down. I found this out when I pointed out that the trees around Boardman Hall were cut down. It took me a while to notice the change, because I almost assumed the trees were there, and that assumption didn't feel right. That building has been at the school for an eternity. I remember walking between Boardman and that Machine Shop to find shelter from the brutal winter winds that swept through campus in February, or to feel the breeze under shade in October. In a way, that lot will always have that old Machine Shop, even as it is razed to the ground and a new building takes its place.
It is my second year of graduate school and the University of Maine is a different place from what it was in 2006, the year I graduated, swearing never to return. I still know the campus like the back of my hand. I can get to any one building from any one building. I know where 101 Bennett or 412 York or 314 Patch are. I remember where to park, how to take the turns and when to avoid the rushes to class. I still order egg salad on spinach wraps with pickles at the Union Marketplace and it tastes exactly the same. Some things have not changed.
But the changes are innumerable, and one most of all: I am different. I remember most of my years in Orono as ones where I was lost, adrift in the adult world, trying to find out who I was and why I was and where I was and where I was going. Now every grain of my time is precious and its expenditure feels strangely urgent; I set every priority for my visits carefully. I arrived in Orono feeling like going to college was not a choice; now I go and it's a place I want to be for as long as I can. I feel the confidence of finally having done well academically and having expertise I didn't have before. In my undergraduate years, my confidence was just a front for what was actually potential. Now, I have walked that personal and professional road only to find myself back where I started, now as a group of students in the Masters of Science in Teaching (MST) program.
The campus is indeed different. A memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. rests at the heart of the campus. The school has finally painted the panels on Shibles Hall from an ugly shade of blue to a better matching (yet equally ugly) brown. The school literature on everything (relationships, academics, sexual assault, queer identity, campus life, student activities, you name it) reads differently. The old arcade is now a banking center. There's a list of fifty things to do before you graduate in the Memorial Union that celebrates everything great about this place.
It's different, and it's still home, years later.
I reflect on this now because even this year is different. I am on a different track from my cohort in the MST program at UMaine, and eventually, the community of learners and people I've found and feel part of in this place will outpace me. I'm part time, so I'm completing classes more slowly and won't finish at the same time. Even though we're all working and still in the program, at some point, this community will evaporate and be gone. Where my time in Orono before felt like an eternity, I recognize that my time here now is flying before me rapidly and that I have to make the most of it.
---------------
I've spent my life looking for community and trying to define what it is. I think I've shoehorned myself into so many that didn't fit me (or me them) that at some point my view of what community is became distorted and off-base. I finally have an idea of this now.
The RiSE Center hosted a cookout last week, and I was excited to tell everyone that I was finally going to become an office rat. Working on graduate school assignments and readings is too hard to do at home or at school. Consequently, I chose to put down twenty dollars deposit on two keys to Estabrook Hall. I got there to find that my original desk had been reassigned, so I got a desk in another office. It felt good, but not quite in the way I thought it would. I remember thinking that getting an office on campus was a sign of status, and that was the only reason I wanted one. Back in my undergraduate years, becoming a graduate student was a vain, egotistical, greedy desire, something that I could say that I did because it made me feel important. Now, it represents a chance to do what folks in my community do: their best work in education with the support and care of one another. I realized, though, as all the MSTs in my cohort sat around a table, eating, laughing, telling inside jokes and sharing advice for another semester, that I had found a place to be that was a community, and that I didn't need the office to find it. I simply needed to be the person I have spent all my life becoming.
This, I've come to learn, is the definition of community: People with shared values and goals who support each other in achieving them and living them. I think I needed to be different to find my way to one again. Now I'm in it and ready for it, even as it speeds by me.
---------------
Luna and Harry exchange the words at the top of this post over Dobby's grave in what is apparently a deleted scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. I have always been a massive fan of Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. I related at one time to their hidden natures and to their own deaths, to their senses of selflessness and valor and kindness. I felt like they were characters that represented me. Now I take this singular line from an incredible and underrated character as my absolute favorite from the whole story. Why?
In the Hogwarts epic, the place changes, even as it remains the same. The ancient Gothic castle, for all its menacing and magical contents, changes year in and year out. The members of its community (mostly of Gryffindor House, of course, but some others, too) resiliently rise to meet all of its challenges throughout the story. Of course, they must change in order to do that. They have to be different, bigger, braver people. They have to grow up and become who they are. Luna Lovegood is simple and direct in her expression of what people must do to belong. That idea, that the place I am in is not the same, and neither am I, is one that has brought me peace.
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