By Thomas Winterhoff
First published on September 1, 2004.
Copyright © Thomas Winterhoff
I love this time of the year, with the crisp morning air providing a tantalizing preview of autumn and people everywhere emerging from the lazy, hazy days of summer with a renewed sense of purpose.
Unlike many people, the notion of the New Year getting underway in the frigid, early morning hours of January 1 has never really resonated with me. Instead, September has always seemed like the most appropriate time for fresh beginnings and new challenges.
Back in my high school days, the approach of fall meant wrapping up that summer job, making the obligatory trip to Lougheed Mall to buy new school clothes and trying to come up with novel ways of persuading the basketball team not to lock me inside my locker every Friday afternoon. Although I’m thankful that the latter happens much less frequently nowadays, I sometimes miss the energy and excitement that comes with embarking on new academic adventures after the Labour Day long weekend.
Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time reading, cheering on my wife as she’s played in her first-ever cricket season and sitting on the Dallas Road waterfront watching boats navigate the waters of Juan de Fuca Strait. I’ve also taken a really good look at how I’ve spent my life so far and determined that I should probably figure out what to do with the rest of it.
Essentially, the brilliant and virtually foolproof plan that my wife and I eventually came up with involves writing a couple of multi-million-dollar screenplays so that we can go and live in a sun-drenched villa in the south of Spain till the end of our days. Once there, we’ll write in the mornings and then spend our afternoons tending the vineyard, hunting for truffles or trying our hand at skeet shooting with Sean Connery and the rest of our new Costa del Sol neighbours — or whatever it is that rich, semi-retired people do in those parts.
The only nagging question remaining after making that important decision was how to get from where I am now to sitting poolside in a small Andalucian village, sipping a cold cerveza and working up the energy to attend yet another Cannes Film Festival.
Twenty-three years ago, after spending two months working in Berlin and then backpacking all over Europe, I came to the conclusion that 17th-century German literature (which I was studying at the University of British Columbia at the time) just didn’t do it for me anymore. I promptly withdrew from school that fall and temporarily put my academic aspirations on hold.
By way of a somewhat circuitous route that involved several aborted career paths, I eventually fell headlong — and happily — into journalism. I’ve won a number of regional and national writing awards over the past four years and I definitely want to continue working in the profession, but I also want to try my hand at other writing disciplines: novels, screenplays, travel writing, weighty treatises on the back of cereal boxes, etc.
I’ve found journalism to be a very satisfying and rewarding career (intellectually, if not financially), but I’ve also come to realize that I’ve left something unfinished for far too long. So I’ve decided, at the ripe old age of 43 and after reviewing my career options, that it’s time to go back to school part-time to fine-tune my writing skills, study history and finish my degree.
I want to expand my horizons, learn a few new tricks, revel in unfamiliar life experiences, topple a few governments and – most importantly – embark on a highly scientific investigation of the fluid dynamics of UVic’s student pub.
I’m excited about going back, but I’m also a little nervous. I’ve pretty much forgotten everything I ever learned about differential calculus, organic chemistry and irregular French verbs, not to mention having to sit up straight, play nicely with the other kids and pay attention in class.
I’ve been driving my wife nuts over the past three months by pulling dozens of dusty old textbooks from our bookshelves and stacking them up in little piles all over the house, with the intention of re-reading them all and getting back up to speed — all in the next seven days or so.
Over the summer, I’ve also been busy tracking down decades-old transcripts, confirming all my UBC transfer credits and planning out my course load over the next two or three years. (Whatever happened to Music Appreciation 101 and Advanced Basket Weaving 218? I couldn’t find them in the UVic course calendar anywhere.)
I’m also a little concerned about how I’ll fit in with the much younger and much more groovy — oh, what a giveaway! — group of students with whom I’ll be attending classes. I recently took a bus up to the campus to meet with a program counsellor and to buy my textbooks and school supplies at the bookstore, where I got unnaturally excited by all the blank pads of paper, high-tech pens and shiny new geometry sets. I spent over an hour in the bookstore but, no matter how hard I looked, couldn’t find where they kept the inkwells, slate tablets or Latin exercise books.
On the bus that day were a couple of girls in their late teens who were discussing clothes and talking about pop bands I’ve never heard of, and giggling about cute guys they’d seen recently. (My name didn’t come up in their conversation.) There were also some young lads talking about hot girls and hot cars, with one of them regaling his friends with tales about how he managed to get hold of a whole case of beer the previous weekend.
Oh, dear.
I harbour no illusions that I’ll simply be accepted as a cool, mildly eccentric and just slightly older student in my classes — perhaps someone who’s just arrived from an exotic, foreign country where it’s customary to hold off attending university until your mid-40s. However, so long as I don’t get mistaken for a professor (or a janitor), I’ll be happy.
I’ll only be going back to school on a part-time basis for now, but I’d like to be able to go to UVic full-time somewhere down the road. In the meantime, I’ll continue to scribble stories on behalf of the News Group – and keep an eye out for those darned inkwells.
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