Social media feeds are awash with first-day-of-school pictures of eager students each September, and I recently added the photo above to my feed a few weeks ago to mark the occasion of entering the 19th grade. 

Forty years to the day that I stood in the gardens of the Great Hall for my Freshman Orientation, I returned for New Graduate Student Orientation as I embark on attaining my Graduate Creative Writing Certificate. I parked in the furthest parking space and took the long way there to get acclimated to the new buildings that have sprung up since I last walked this campus in the ’80s, and I got my Apple Watch steps in to boot! Side note: When is the bookstore going to stock Monmouth-branded compression stockings? 

I took the long way to this garden orientation in more ways than one. Sure, my Apple Watch has a built-in GPS to guide me around campus, but there was no road map for my family as they dropped me off at Elmwood Hall in September 1984. I was the first of my clan to attend college; my Irish-born parents worked tirelessly, saving grubby dollar diner tips and New Jersey Turnpike overtime pay to make this move-in possible. They poured everything they had into this proud moment, and I squandered it in the first semester with “summa cum lucky” grades. My plan was to load up on science classes in pursuit of a degree in pharmacy that I’d eventually finish elsewhere, but I soon learned that a bartender is a pharmacist with a more limited inventory and decided to pursue the “pub ’n’ party” curriculum instead.  

I fell in with some communication majors, falling in love and eventually marrying one of them (Barbara Miskoff ’89). I took shifts on WMCX, wrote music reviews for The Outlook, and landed bit parts in Woods Theatre productions. Academic probation was a strong motivator to change my major from biology to business, and the grades soon improved. These experiences would become a blueprint to “doing life” for the next four decades. In between carpooling my daughters and taking business meetings overseas as a biotech senior commercial leader, I somehow managed to write six novels, three award-winning scripts that were made into short films, and produced two off-Broadway plays. 

I maintained warm ties to the campus, serving on a number of alumni boards over the years. When the pandemic hit, Monmouth University pivoted by offering Zoom classes as part of their Adult Education Series, and I was asked to facilitate a series of memoir writing classes. I am so grateful for this opportunity as it has awakened my life purpose for the rest of my time on earth. I now exist to empower and enable others to tell their stories and fully realize their creative potential, and so I return to campus this time around to deepen my own creative writing abilities so that I may help others do the same. 

I walked the full length of the campus after orientation, a man strolling through his past while eager to face new challenges with the wisdom and experience that comes with grey temples. I watched students stitching new friendships in the quad near the residence halls, and I offered a silent prayer that they discover new love and enjoy the same lifelong alumni bonds that have sustained my wife and I through 32 years of wedded bliss. 

As I rounded the corner on the Great Lawn apartments, I encountered a man about my age struggling to negotiate a large television from the back of his weathered pickup truck. I offered him a helping hand as he moved his daughter in, and he thanked me in broken English. As I approached him, I noticed speckles of paint on his hands, wristwatch, and white Converse sneakers. It brought me back to a time 40 years ago when my own Irish immigrant father packed his dreams for a better life into the boxes that went into his son’s dormitory in Elmwood Hall. 

I am grateful for this full-circle moment and relish in the experience of being back at home to write the next best chapter of my life!