Homage to Home

The countdown is two days until the flight to Brazil. I’m simultaneously packing the apartment for B’s eventual move to Palo Alto, and packing suitcases for my year-long trip abroad.

In a sense, this move is more than another change in addresses. B will be on the job market this fall (good vibes!), and when I return, we may no longer live in the Bay Area. Her top choice positions are all at schools outside of California. (This is by necessity; there’s at least a year-long hiring freeze across the UC system, and Stanford won’t hire their own. No word from other universities in southern California so far.) We may be returning in August to pack our items on the Peninsula into a U-Haul and drive wherever work takes us. (The current options range from Chicago to College Station to Princeton to Williamsburg.)

I have become, thus, a little nostalgic about my brief four years back in California. We have a list of activities to do in San Francisco that will remain incomplete. We might not miss the high rents and the high cost of living, but we’ll certainly miss the cheap, local, and fresh produce. I have memories of winters in Washington, DC, in which the only fruit options at the grocery store were hormone-addled apples, oranges, and bananas from October to March. We won’t miss crazy people babbling to themselves or trying to get your attention on the bus, on the street, and in the stores. I will miss the curiosity of seeing people of all stripes and thinking, ‘well, I never considered that alternative.’

I’ll miss the running routes through the hills, and the views that are your reward for summiting, for descending, for coming around the corner. I felt a little bit of pride, that I was passing the torch, when I took Neal running today and showed him all the various route combinations of the Upper, Lower, and Back Jordan Fire Trails above campus. Now it’ll be someone else’s turn to discover and huff and puff.

Most of all, I’ll miss the people. Some friends will still be in the Bay Area when I return; some won’t. A colleague moving to Hanover, NH, for a job remarked, “We’re out of here. See you at conferences, I guess.” Just as in college, the coming end of graduate school means that people will spread across the country, to be reunited for conferences every so often.

In short, I feel melancholy. B’s currently in Oslo for two weeks. I do have the good fortune in that it’s easy to cheer myself up. I just remember that someone else is paying me to spend a year in Brazil, and how fantastic that is. Brazil is a remedy for many of the above maladies: the fruit is delicious and exotic, the people are friendly, and until January I’ll live near the northern tip of Parque do Flamengo and its running path.