on being a college freshman

This past weekend, for approximately 42 minutes, I was a carefree college freshman, juggling on a lawn speckled with fallen leaves that hinted at the coming of autumn.

Let me back up.

This weekend, R. visited from New York, and we set up a lunch date with Sabrina, her ex-star student from two years ago. Sabrina was sweet-faced and sharp, but with her layers of black t-shirts and tight fitting jeans, she seemed slightly out of place with the short shorts college girls and Frisbee-playing BBs in the green rolling hills of the Tufts campus. She spoke carefully, but surely about the large disparity between her high school classes in Brooklyn and Tufts classes, and as she spoke, I painfully recalled the grammatical and mathematical skills of many of my students. How would they ever go to 'collage' and 'suceed' there with those skills?

R. and I accompanied Sabrina back to her dorm, where her roommate was still leisurely sleeping (despite the fact that it was 4:30pm), and then back out into the lawn to take pictures by their fierce mascot, the elephant Jumbo. As we were blithely posing, a voice called out from the lawn: "Want to juggle?" The answer, of course, was yes. Giggling furiously at being mistaken for collegiates, we walked towards the lawn, Sabrina, ironically, the tallest of us three, and proceeded to try to juggle our hearts out. I quickly memorized my new identity: "P., freshman, loves dogs, uses Febreze, living in Ballou Hall," which wasn't that hard, partially because it wasn't that different from my current identity, but mostly because, I didn't feel like freshman year of college was that long ago.

What I can say about the "Juggling Club" ? The members were friendly, patient (with our lack of skillz), willing to look ridiculous by unicycling and juggling simultaneously, and were shockingly polite when R. finally admitted that we were only masquerading as Tufts freshmen, and were instead, a teacher and an office worker. With the sun slanting gently through the trees, colored balls flying in the air, and Sabrina having the time of her life, life felt ... good. Afterwards, we took a Tufts bus back home, and no one questioned or carded us as we boarded the bus. I think I need to go back to school.