Goodbye Williamsburg

This weekend I worked my final day at the Colonial Williamsburg Visitors’ Center.  Friday night was my last work shift; Saturday afternoon I showed up for a staff party.  After having worked there for almost a year, my emotions were mixed when it came time to say goodbye.

There are certainly facets of the job that I won’t miss.  I won’t miss the incessant fife-and-drum music that plays all day, everyday in perpetuum—I now sometimes hear these tunes in my sleep.  Nor will I miss the endless process of stocking shelves and making sure that every widget is perfectly aligned so as to maximize a potential buyer’s urge to grab one and buy it, although this chore is somewhat gratifying to my OCD tendencies.

And while I believe very much that vocationally I am a people-person, neither will I miss having to paint a smile on my face and act thrilled every time a customer approaches the cash register to check out.  In retail, this discipline is a must, which I made sure to do, but sometimes it just felt fake, like I was having to wear a mask, and I hate it when people are fake and wear masks.  I certainly believe that my experiences this past year were good for me and will translate into my career down the road, but I also know that I’m not a retail guy at heart.

But it wasn’t for the things that I won’t miss that I almost got choked up as I left the Visitors’ Center on Saturday.  No, it was the thought of saying goodbye to people that I had come to love that tugged at my heartstrings.  I have grown attached to each one of these people in a special way, and I know that they had grown to love me, and now the necessity of circumstance required that we could no longer daily see each other.

Saying goodbye.  We live in a world of change—a world of mortality.  Someday we each must say goodbye to those we love, and our souls cry out at such a cruel fate.  It is in these moments that ever so briefly I yearn for Heaven and wish for reunion some distant day in the future.  Such a hope comforts my soul.

I don’t mean to be so dramatic: I fully expect to see my Visitors’ Center coworkers again—in this life—but it is often the transitions in life that force us to think more deeply than our hum-drum, predictable schedules do.

So I say “Goodbye” to my CW friends, my track friends, my Intervarsity chapter friends, and I say “Hello” to my Fellows friends.  Tomorrow I leave Williamsburg and William & Mary—this five-year chapter of my life—behind, and I embark on the dizzying world of Washington D.C.  Fellows Retreat, here I come!