I’ve been commuting to the University of Richmond since Monday, when I started my new job as Director of Teaching, Learning and Technology. Each day in the Silver Surfer (my new Honda) I’ve been choosing my music carefully, listening closely for “winding chains of harmony” that can tune me for my new role in a new place. Plucked, bowed, hammered, or humming with sympathetic vibrations, taut or slack, the strings need to sound together, so something beautiful can emerge. Once the tuning is right, my job is easy: focus, amplify, and sustain that beauty.

In a word, my job is to resonate, and to resonate I must be tuned.

Monday I pulled out of my Fredericksburg driveway to Who’s Next. “Baba O’ Riley” was what I needed to get to I-95 South, but “Bargain” prayed for me and tuned what lay “too deep for tears.”

Tuesday I went even deeper, and departed to the strains of the live version of Tommy as realized on disc two of the deluxe edition of Live at Leeds. My heart grew strong with the first few bars of the “Overture,” and found its ascent during “Amazing Journey.”

Wednesday the tuning was more enigmatic. (How lovely to have a little breathing room for an enigma at last.) Perhaps Aja will not seem enigmatic to some readers. I urge them to listen again. There are mysterious narratives implicit in each song on this glossy album, some of them grim, but almost none of them desperate (in contrast to a couple of real downers on The Royal Scam, for instance). Even “Home At Last” seemed oddly determined to me as I powered down Interstate 95. Or was that determination mine?

Today’s tuning drives me back here, to a place silent too long. As you might guess from the title of the post, the Silver Surfer and I shook to Rubber Soul. The shaking kept me steady. And when “In My Life” sounded, I knew how to blog today.

Last week I ended twelve years of employment at the University of Mary Washington, where I joined the Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech in the fall of 1994. I’ve lost count of how many students I taught there. A back-of-napkin tally might go like this: an average of 100 a term for 24 terms equals 2400, not counting summer school, but probably a little too generous because I taught many students more than once. The number of colleagues I worked with is much smaller, of course, but even there it’s in the hundreds, and over time I got to know most of them. So last week there was a tremendous scaling problem for me. How could I possibly say goodbye even to a fraction of the people I had come to love? More to the point, how could I do any justice to the deep gratitude I feel for them, students and colleagues alike?

I couldn’t, of course–not that I could stop trying, either.

What I could do, I did. I resolved to take the full measure of their farewell, which is to say I resolved to take the full measure of the community we had created together. There are no words to describe how full to overflowing that measure was. Births, weddings, funerals, and leave-takings all release abundance. I was unprepared, though, for the scale of this abundance. Though I’m still grieving over the parting, the biggest lump in my throat comes when I remember, not the goodbyes, but the looks of delight and maybe even surprise on so many faces as we recognized our abundance together.

Inadequate words, but they’ll have to do. The details, the many narratives woven and shared in that astonishing week, are beyond me, where they should be, so I may follow.

Now I come to a new place, a new job, new colleagues, new students. Yet not entirely new, for I began my full-time teaching career in Ryland Hall right here at the University of Richmond. I can walk to that first office in five minutes, even faster if I’m in a hurry. Several dear colleagues from those days are still here. I’ve already gotten email from a student I taught during that time, a student who now works in the UR Alumni Office. I’ve also heard from an especially dear former student from UMW who’s teaching in the UR School of Continuing Studies. And the connections continue to multiply. No doubt living a certain number of years makes those connections more frequent and likely for anyone, but my apophenia also kicks in and I have the uncanny sense of pattern, of an upwardly-spiralling return.

Find, tune, resonate. There’s new abundance here, new colleagues to know and treasure, golden moments hidden in plain sight to discover and share. “Fresh woods, and pastures new,” and I am nothing if not an uncouth swain. Yet I know something of what’s possible, and delight to imagine what I’ll learn from this new community.

In my life, I’ve loved you all.