Meditations on an Oberlin Autumn

One day in early October I met a cat on the bike trail. As I approached, it saw me before I saw it, and it made no hurry to get up and get out of my way, so I didn’t notice the cat until I was just a few feet away. I was running and listening to a few podcast episodes for my creative writing class, and my eyes were fixed on the middle distance, not at the pavement below my feet. Still, I regret how, when I realized that the white shape below the center of my visual field was a cream-colored cat, and not a splotch of white paint or something similar, I stopped on a dime, startling it and sending it running away.

It came back, after a moment. It was not an introverted cat: so much I could surmise after it approached me, plaited its way around my legs in a path resembling a figure-eight, and proceeded to rub its cheek across the exposed plastic wrapper of some grape-flavored energy gel that I kept in my pocket. It was friendly, playful, everything you’d expect from a housecat. The thought occurred to me: was it lost? Perhaps it had come to the bike trail in desperate search of a good Samaritan to lead it home? I recalled, dimly, that I had once downloaded an app that would let me read the data from the tracking chip inside a 10K race bib, and which could also scan microchips for pets. But a quick scan of the cat’s shoulder yielded nothing, and though it wore a collar, the collar was bereft of tags.

Then it turned and scampered off through the leaves. I stood and watched it find its way through a hole in the pathside fence, headed for the bottom of the hill on the other side… where it approached a nearby house. The cat was from the neighborhood, probably on the bike trail for the same reason that I was: to enjoy the warm, early autumn weather while it lasted. There was nothing to worry about.

Early autumn in Oberlin is a season of change. Trees turn red and brown, leaves fall, seasonal dining hall menus come and depart. People apply to study abroad programs and get accepted and face the fact that they won’t see their friends for almost a full year. People rifle through the winter term program offerings, searching for something to pique their interest. It is a time of early morning chill, of applications and recommendation letters, of follow-through.

Earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to study abroad. This was an easy decision to make in the moment. It became more difficult when I found that I also had to answer the obvious next question: where was I going to study abroad? I took three semesters of Japanese in my first two years at Oberlin, and the thought of going to Japan crossed my mind.

So, this fall, I decided to apply to a few programs that I had heard of through my Japanese class. Embarrassingly, though, I neglected to consider that studying abroad meant that I wouldn’t be at Oberlin. And when this reality occurred to me, it made me consider what I actually wanted from my study abroad program. What could studying in Japan offer me, when at Oberlin I had my choirs, my a cappella group, my friends? I resolved only to apply to programs that would be worth missing Oberlin for.

I haven’t heard back from some of these programs yet. It feels strange to still remain undecided about what program I’m going to, this late in the game. I will be spending a good deal of my fall break sending forms to professors and doctors and other affiants to my study abroad suitability. But so it goes. This is what autumn is: dealing with change and uncertainty. The leaf leaves the tree and spirals towards the ground, and who knows exactly where it will land.

Early autumn in Oberlin is a season of earnestness. New students find their stride; returning students remember all the little places on campus and around town that they forgot about. Things begin in earnest. Classes ramp up their workload, performers stop rehearsing and start performing, recitals and concerts abound. On a Thursday evening you can go from a workshop to a sponsored dinner to a play to a concert to a game night. On the weekends: music rehearsals, D&D, lunch and dinner and TV with friends. Schedules and classroom buildings burgeon with the sheer amount of things happening.

And something very interesting happens in the middle of the semester at a liberal arts college like Oberlin: you start learning things about a class while you’re in another class. This semester, I’m taking three classes about different forms of media: video games, podcasts, and movies. Just recently has it occurred to me that I should think about the differences between the development of each of these art forms. …How long will it be until there are major, well-known, institutional studios dedicated to the creation of podcasts? Will that ever happen? Maybe not: podcasting has an incredibly low barrier to entry, whereas creating video games has always required a large time commitment and personal film cameras didn’t exist for a significant chunk of the history of movies.

This is how I have learned to learn things at Oberlin: classes become more than the sum of their parts.

I’m writing this on the last day of classes before fall break. It occurs to me that I’m one quarter done with this year — put another way, since I’m a third year, I’m now nine-sixteenths of the way through my time at Oberlin. If you’re a musician, if my time at Oberlin is one measure of 4/4, I’m at the ‘e’ of beat 3.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what I should do to make the most out of my time left at Oberlin. Here, at the ‘e’ of beat 3, in this awkward place between eighth notes, it feels like the right time to figure out where I’m going. I’ve made a few decisions. I’m studying abroad next semester, of course. When I come back, I want to do some theater. I want to start or join a band. (Maybe I’ll do Rando Bando?) I want to submit my writing to publications, both on and off campus.

Oh, and my friend and I are going to write a musical. That has been taking up a good deal of the space in my mind. We have some pretty good ideas, though I can’t share anything yet. I hope we finish it in time to produce it here at Oberlin.

As you can no doubt see, there are so many things I want to do before I leave here. And now I’m in a very familiar dilemma: following through on everything I want to do, while making room to try new things. This can be hard to think about, and when I do, I try to take the long view. I know that getting anything done requires both moments of inspiration and weeks of work, both earnestness and follow-through.

This autumn, for me, is about follow-through. I have study abroad applications to finish, songs to write, concerts to put on. And I’m starting to look forward to it. Despite the truly mystifying weather we’ve had recently — a sunshower with hail, daily swings from 35 to 75 degrees — I’m going into the second half of this semester with a sunny disposition. I think about the cat on the bike path sometimes, which (I can confirm) lives in the area, and which now recognizes me every time I pass by. The autumn is beautiful, and if you let them, things find a way to turn out fine.