A year ago, I left this place — and didn't, as you'll see below. I took a year off, but ended up working in Princeton for most of the year. I'll leave the semantics to you; for now I'm going to keep using the word "leave."
I left in a pretty heavy state of panic, bolting like a horse from a branding iron. I'd taken 15 classes — in 13 departments. This was great for keeping options open, and for looking on paper like, as my roommate once flattered me, a "well-rounded gentleman." At least the well rounded part.
What it was not so great for was getting an idea of what courses above the 200 level were like. As junior year drew nearer, I was clueless about classes, clueless about what I ought to major in, and most of all, clueless about where the limbo I was in would lead. So I bailed.
Fortunately for my ego and image, the idea of taking a year off seemed to carry a certain mystique, an aura of adventure. People assumed that I was off to find myself in some grand adventure in a faraway, exotic or rugged place. Instead, I soon found myself in the E-Quad.
CIT had just created a position responsible for doing computer support there. It started out as a temporary thing for me: I was going to work there for six weeks, save a little cash and take off for parts unknown. But the money got to me, as did the promises of health insurance, a retirement fund — kind of creepy when you're only 20 years old, actually — and my very own Palm Pilot.
By October I'd committed to work through the winter. By November I'd fulfilled my lifelong dream of getting a driver's license. By December I had an office, complete with one of those sterile gray E-Quad nameplates: "ALLEN." By the new year I'd bought myself a car, which I drove, by some accounts, recklessly — but, alas, not wrecklessly — through the next eight months.
I know that a job working for CIT at the E-Quad seems like the greatest possible killer of possibilities for a year off. And, geographically, it was. I never lived more than 10 miles away from Princeton.
First was a small, cheaply rented house about 10 miles towards the Delaware River, from which I biked to work each day, arriving sweaty but invigorated around 9 a.m. Then there was an even cheaper apartment in Ewing, just outside Trenton.
Until I got the car, my chosen modes of transportation — when I wasn't crashing with friends in Spelman — were NJ Transit trains and Trenton city cabs, the latter of which were often driven by shameless rip-off artists. Fortunately, their frequent excursions into my wallet didn't last long: In December I got the car, and in June I moved out of their domain for good, into 1915 Hall for summer housing.
With no papers or exams to worry about, there was free time aplenty to do all the things I'd never seemed to have time for when I was in school. For New Year's weekend, my brother Matt and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Georgia, where we'd grown up. I was finally doing my part to carry on the noble tradition of the college road trip. (But I wasn't in college. Hard to say if it counted or not; I prefer to think that it does.)
I picked him up in Richmond on Friday night, and we drove through the night. Interstate 85 in South Carolina was as straight and as lonely as we'd remembered it from the long trips of our youths, endless corridors of pine trees lining the road as far as our eyes could see. We crossed into Georgia around noon Saturday.
It was my first time back there since we'd moved away when I was 16. We stopped in the mountain town of Demorest, where our parents used to take us on Saturdays. The park we remembered as huge and expansive seemed tiny, and the swingset I'd used for flight practice when I was ten let out an unhappy groan the moment I sat down. We kept driving.
We eventually made it to Atlanta to see our old house and elementary school, before getting bored and turning around that evening, when Matt popped a couple of Vivarin and drove north through the night to Richmond.
The spring and summer passed in a steady flow of other, more modest trips: to Staten Island and Freehold, N.J. with my girlfriend and another friend; to the golf course on a long nighttime walk with a couple of friends; to the Blue Ridge of Virginia with yet another friend, to see my brother and parents, and do some hiking and camping; and trips to Montreal and California that never quite materialized.
I'm selling the car now, so it probably won't see any more of these trips. But the ones I did take helped take a bit of the panic out of Princeton, by reminding me that yes, there's life beyond Faculty Road.
Nothing like a year off to make this place seem manageable again.
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