Back to School

The decision to go back to school wasn't an easy one. Gertrude felt like she was too old. Not too old to learn - she had never lost her love for learning. She couldn't picture her body on campus. She knew that there were more non-traditional students than ever before, but it didn't feel right.

Still, she looked at the course catalog and tried to decide what to study. After reading all of the admissions materials, she still wasn't sure if she should audit classes or actually attempt to earn a degree. Both seemed intimidating for different reasons. If she attended lectures and did the work, she'd like to have something to show for it. Plus, she'd be the first person in her family to go to college, even if there was no one left to acknowledge that accomplishment.

Gertrude enrolled in four intro courses that fall: sociology, Latin, creative writing, and philosophy. Depending on the day she felt proud of her eclectic courseload or like a total fraud taking random classes. She couldn't deny that she enjoyed the lectures and having a pile of work to tackle. She even liked writing papers now that she could use her computer to add footnotes instead of calculating space for them at the bottom of a typewritten page.

She thought philosophy would be her sweet spot, but she struggled to translate the readings into anything remotely resembling her daily life. When she read interpretations online, philosophy had resonated with her, so she was disappointed to find out it wasn't the right fit.

Creative writing, though, was almost like philosophy, except she could make up whatever she wanted and ascribe a deeper meaning to it. She liked to write about her childhood and the years she should have been in college if she went right after graduation. She twisted the stories - just slightly - and ended them with a subtle lesson. Nothing moral, nothing that would raise the hackles of the younger students around her, just something discrete that made the reader view the beginning of the story in an entirely different light.

She liked watching their faces while they workshopped her stories. They'd often look a bit frustrated at where she was taking them until, at the very end, a line or two wrapped everything up and spun it on its head. Some of them would gape like fish, just for a minute, and then nod in appreciation.

404 words