By Degrees

I was in college a long time ago. It's been a quarter of a century since I graduated. It's been long enough ago that I don't have a solid grasp on all the things I learned way back then. I remember some of the books. I remember some of the teachers. I remember a few of the faces, but not many names. It's been just about long enough to forget about all the fun I had way back then.
My reading of Melville offered me the wry bon mot, "I would prefer not to," from his short story "Bartleby the Scrivener," but I don't think I would feel comfortable discussing the whiteness of the whale. I took an astrophysics course so I could find Orion in the winter sky. I took a music appreciation course because I had to. I had taken so many film study courses and creative writing workshops that I was well on my way to generating two degrees instead of the one that I was after. I had started late, taking a year off after high school to figure out that growing up might mean moving away from the faces and places that I was most familiar. And I transferred from the small liberal arts college I entered in my freshman year to return to the great big university just up the hill from where I grew up. It was not my most decisive time. That first year in school found me experimenting with drink and drugs. I got engaged to my high school sweetheart. I broke up with my high school sweetheart. I moved to full-scale research on drink and drugs. If there were wild oats to be sown, I sowed them.
Eventually, my parents let me know that the funding was not unlimited, and I should look into graduating. I took my fistful of credits to a counselor, a visit that I had put off for four years, and asked him what I could do to get out of college. He looked at my transcript and raised an eyebrow at the semester I spent on academic probation. He laid out a plan: no more movies or short stories. Take the required courses, get a diploma, and get on with my life.
Which is what I did, and I didn't look back. Every now and then I will stumble on my copy of Janson's "History of Art," or find a way to steer a conversation into the neighborhood of my arcane knowledge of F.W. Murnau. I have a Bachelor of Arts Degree, which essentially means I am uniquely qualified for the task of writing the words you are reading right now. I hope you enjoy my education as much as I must have.