Over
the past seven years, I have come to truly enjoy my work in this association. After every directors’ workshop, I brought
home ideas, tips, and best practices to implement in my program. Presenters at each conference bent my mind in
new ways: a civil rights colleague of Martin Luther King in Memphis, the U.S.
Poet Laureate Billy Collins in Orlando, Michael Powell of Powell’s Bookstore in
Portland, the Akwaaba Quartet performing Ghanaian highlife music here in
Chicago. And I always looked forward to
the conference excursions and impromptu short adventures: water-taxi’ing over to Granville Island in
Vancouver, visiting the Tiffany museum in Winter Park, seeing the salmon
running in the Columbia River Gorge, and the taking the Chicago Architectural
Foundation river tour have to rank among my top favorites.
Most
of all, I have appreciated the friends I have made among the other directors,
especially those whom I have worked to present the West coast symposium for our
collective students, and those with whom I have served on the board. By and large, we share backgrounds in the
humanities, with a few in the social sciences, and an occasional scientist in
the mix (come to think of it, they’ve been physicists. . . .hmmmm). During breakfast, lunch, or dinner
conversations, early-morning or late-afternoon walks, late-night talks, and
subway rides back to the airport, we’ve commiserated over institutional
politics, celebrated family and professional accomplishments, mourned each
other’s losses. It happened to be during
the time my USC MLS program was undergoing the AGLSP full member review process,
akin to accreditation, that I mentioned to our external reviewer, the director
from Stanford, how I “keep having to go back for more blood tests” because each
blood test would indicate something not quite right. Perhaps because she felt she was in at the
ground level with me long before we knew it was cancer, she always takes me
aside to ask me how I’m really
doing.
So
there we were, after the conclusion of the business meeting, the
representatives from Stanford, Duke, Skidmore College, Reed College, Widener
University, hugging me one more time and insisting this wasn’t goodbye. As happy I am with my new position and glad
of it, leaving the AGLSP and leaving the responsibilities of MLS to someone else have been the hardest part of saying “yes” to the new job. I
was glad that one of them kept repeating, “This can’t
be goodbye.”
This
past week in Chicago was unseasonably sunny and warm, and every local speaker
took credit for arranging the uncharacteristically nice weather for us
visitors. But just as I got to O’Hare
for the flight home, a thunderstorm rolled in, and we flew out in afternoon
darkness and pelting rain. Like the
Chicago fall sunshine, I guess all good stints must come to an end. But I do hope to see these colleagues again
sometime, just as Chicagoans go into fall, hoping again for the return of the
warmth of the sun.