I had the first big wave of Reality hit me today while walking from the school library back to my classroom, during the passing period, walking through the kids with about five different “Hi, Mr. Gregorys” and one hug along the way.

It was Imminent Retirement Student Withdrawal Anxiety.

I don’t want to sound like Maria traipsing through an Alpine meadow–I rooted for the Wehrmacht in that movie–but thirty-two years ago I sat down in Cary Nerelli’s class at Morro Bay High–after years of aimlessness, numbed from some of life’s body blows– to observe for a Poly education class, and I instantly knew this was where I belonged. Now I’m 63, and this year, like every other, I have to fight the urge to blurt, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?”

We teachers deal with hope and potential, we heal heartbreak, and we take our students to places they’ve never seen–most of those lie inside themselves–and thirty years have failed to blunt the excitement I felt my first day of student teaching, when the kid with the curly hair asked me if I knew my hands were shaking, and the kid in the back complained that my handouts weren’t hole-punched.

“Punch your own damned holes!” I replied.

We got along fine after that. And we have ever since.