What I don’t talk about when I talk about graduation

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Three years ago, I wrote a dreamy love letter to downtown Minneapolis in pandemic conditions that was published by Star Tribune Opinion (“What I don’t talk about when I talk about the pandemic,” June 2021).

At that time, I was an office coordinator commuting into downtown daily.

Having gladly gone from 127 to 120 pounds in a year due to decreased work stressors.

An ambivert finding hoops and lists manageable due to a dearth of in-person communications.

Up at 6:15 a.m. and home at 6:15 p.m. with no stops.

Morning views from the connector bus yield Surdyk’s, the post office and dogs walking their people.

City Center is still standing, but the lower-level Marshalls is no more.

The IDS Center Starbucks is again hopping, its in-person line in full swing and out the door most days.

The connector bus home brings a return jaunt through Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Marveling as I behold the city skyline for the second time in 10 hours: I’m still here.

(Winters are tolerated for this reason only, with this last one proving a delightful exception to the rule — if not for the less delightful reminder of global warming.)

But my extended family is out East; as such, summers were spent at the shore with “the Philadelphia cousins.”

Autobiography assignments from middle school onward found me making a living as a Manhattan writer with a Holland lop-eared rabbit for company.

(A gently indirect reply to my Philadelphia-proud grandmother’s oft-heard “I don’t know what’s so great about New York.”)

Autobiographically, then, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: an English major.

But because I transferred to Macalester, I brought enough humanities credits from the U to be unable to justify the study-abroad experience that interested me most: Oxford.

While I couldn’t justify the cost of studying abroad, though, I could certainly justify the cost of studying away.

As taken from “The Great Gatsby” narrator Nick Carraway, “the [Midwest] … seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East … .”

In short, my post-graduation plan consisted of two words: Get out.

I spent the year after graduation applying to East Coast programs. Visions of Ithaca, Manhattan and Providence — oh my! — danced through my head.

(Never mind that I already moseyed my way to undergraduate seminars in this manner. Surely the East Coast experience was completely different.)

I ended up getting into one of the nine English programs to which I applied. While it was an East Coast program, it was also a summer program.

I spent the next two academic years in Minneapolis and St. Paul — the very metropolises I was ostensibly trying to leave.

And I spent the next two summers in a town with easy access to maple syrup and fairly easy access to Manhattan.

I made my way to seminars on a shade-dappled road, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in hand.

As taken from Gatsby himself: “I only stayed [two] months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford [wo]man.”

But because of said program, those two months remain a brilliant memory.

Had I gotten into any of the eight other English programs to which I applied, I would have gladly gone — and I would likely, glumly, still be making time and space to pay off debt.

An occasional coffee would be all I would be able to afford.

But because I didn’t, I now make time and space to write in cities in which I am able to afford a daily habit.

Instead, I’m making strides toward publishing work while in the metro. (Which includes this paper.)

I’m still here.

And so I beat on with other like-minded graduates, boat against the cities’ current, pointed ceaselessly toward the present.