There is a certain magic on a college campus the first day of a new semester. Even as a teacher I still feel it.

I remember that initial rush the first time, when I was 21 and just off my Mormon mission. I had enrolled in a summer term at Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho. It was a little overwhelming, navigating through the buildings on the moderately sized campus as I tried to find my classrooms. There was a sea of young people, backpacks on shoulders and smiles on faces, as they looked at each other, treading new ground underneath their feet. Clubs had tables set out, looking for other students who might want to play chess or lacrosse, who might want to sing in the choir or play acoustic guitar, who might want to start a comedy club or engage in organized debates. There were organizations for Asian-American students, for Democratic students, for role play gamers, and roller derbies.

Everyone there, every new student, was looking for that sense of belonging as they stepped into an entirely new world of deadlines, syllabi, friend circles, and routines. Gym, this way, library, that way. I remember exploring campus, wondering where I would fit in. I stepped on to the theater stage for the first time, where I hoped I would get to perform in shows. I walked past park benches and gardens and open lawns where I would spread out a blanket and sit to study, shoeless.

Every semester, as I continued my education at Boise State University and Eastern Washington University, carried with it that same sense of newness, adventure, anxiety, apprehension, and wonder.

I can sense it again now, walking through the main campus of the University of Utah, where I’m beginning to teach a new semester in the College of Social Work. I’m ad junct here, teaching one day per week, and that has its own struggles and pitfalls. But I’d forgotten what it feels like to be present.

In the main building, there is a job fair, where students browse the tables looking for temporary employment at ski resorts or coffee shops or retail stores or computer labs, something they can wedge between their busy academic schedules to give them a bit of spending money. College is nothing if not expensive. Food vendors on the next floor sell off breakfast and lunch items to students who settle in at tables with open laptops or phones in hand, still too early in the semester for much studying or books. Most of the students are sitting solo, still working to make friends, still finding their places.

Outside are all the club tables. Two Muslim women sit at a table handing out literature about their religion. Two young men sit at a similar table, handing out flyers about atheism. There is a climbing club, a tennis club, a Pokémon club. There are handsome guys discussing mountain biking and gorgeous girls talking about yoga. There is chocolate and apples and taffy and pencils and bottled water being handed out to passersby. There is an Asian woman struggling to communicate with a Hispanic man, neither of them speaking English well and both trying hard.

I look around, remembering the feelings of outrage at overpriced new college text books and panic at the competing deadlines of class assignments. So much pressure, and so much freedom, and so much potential and opportunity. I watch the new students watching each other, looking for their place, and I find myself with dueling emotions of being so relieved that that part of my life is over, and being so jealous that they get to start now when I want the chance to do it all over again.

“Through the years, I’ve encountered about every attitude and response known to the human emotional spectrum. Some people thought me a courageous pioneer, others regarded me as disgusting and immoral; some of the clergy considered that I had committed an ungodly act. Why these reactions to me should be so explosively pro and con, only God or the Devil knows, and I suspect they are both puzzled.

“Many times, I’ve been accused of living a masquerade as a female, but if I have not already made it clear I will state again that, in my view, the real masquerade would have been to continue in my former state. That, to me, would have been living the lie.

“I suppose another main purpose in this narrative has been to relate the facts of how I adjusted to the world and how the world adjusted to me, now that time has allowed a more objective examination. Though, indeed, my outward appearance was changed, I think I’m basically one and the same person I was in the earlier part of my life-perhaps calmer, more accepting and certainly happier. I’ve found that my eagerness for living has in no way diminished.

“I’ve often been asked if, give the chance, I would make the same decisions and seek the same goals. My answer to that is unequivocal-yes.” –Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Autobiography

In the 1950s, and for a few decades afterward. Christine Jorgensen was the Caitlyn Jenner of her time. In other words, because of media attention making her gender transition a scandal, and because of Christine’s own desire for media attention, she headed newspaper and magazine gossip columns and inspired much public debate about the roles and expressions of gender. A blonde, blue-eyed, almost frail boy named George who grew up in an affluent family through the depression years briefly became a soldier and a photographer before HE became SHE. George became Christine, a buxom and fashionable attention-seeking woman, wrapped in furs and strutting on stages.

Christine was certainly determined. She spent her first two decades of not fitting in. She wasn’t like the other boys around her, not in any way. And even though she was attracted to boys, she wasn’t a homosexual. And even though she felt like a woman inside, she didn’t look like other women. She floated alone, in her own universe, not fitting in with anyone at all. She searched and studied everything she could about hormones and gender transition. She sought out psychotherapists and endocrinologists and she took herself to Denmark where she spent years (literally years) transitioning into a full female, using new scientific breakthroughs to help her adopt a new life.

Christine spent her following decades in the public eye. She starred in plays, interviewed for magazines, posed for photographers, dated famous men, travelled the world, starred in her own nightclub act, and, for a long time, she was a name on everyone’s lips around the world. And yet, a few years later, hers was a name barely anyone would remember, a testament to the true nature of celebrity.

Ultimately, Christine Jorgensen was a brave, talented, beautiful, and trend-setting transgender woman who, for the most part, lived life on her terms, and she deserves to be remembered for the way that she lived and the person that she was.

The museum was set up in what must have been an old department store of some kind. I pictured the building lined with racks of clothes and a makeup counter, cash register up front with a woman in a dress ringing people up, circa 1950s. Now it was arranged into careful and painstaking displays that captured the storied history of the small town of Delta, Utah.

I’d never been to this particular city before. It was a little bigger than I thought, but still felt very much like a small town. I was here researching, and I explored the streets of the little community before stopping at the local museum, figuring this was as good a place as any to start. The walls were covered in old photographs, hand written stories, artifacts from the settling of the city, and items that would have existed among the town’s residents back-in-the-day. There was a display counter full of old items, a mannequin behind it posed as if ready to sell something. One side of the museum was dedicated to rocks and quarrying, important to the development of a community that relied primarily on those industries. Another entire wall was devoted to the stories of military men who were prisoners-of-war or veterans or lost in combat, all of whom originated in the region.

I learned a lot about the city in my short visit. Set up initially as a short railroad switch stop, the train going all the way from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, the community was called Aiken and Melville and Burtner before they adopted the name Delta. Free land was In the early 1900s, free land was offered to anyone who would come in and farm a 40 acre plot, and the residents began moving in. In time it became a town, then a city, and the population of the place is around 3400 now.

I came across one particular story, a hand-typed account of a man, now deceased, who served as a prisoner of war during World War II in Japan. It looked fascinating but was nearly 70 pages long, so I flagged down the volunteer, an overweight short woman that I’ll call Mavis. I learned she was nearly 90 as we spoke.

“Hi, I was wondering if I could get a copy of this book? I don’t have time to read the whole thing now but it looks fascinating.”

She thumbed through the booklet. “Oh, that is a find. It’s a wonderful story, so full of history. I knew this man my whole life. But I’m sorry to tell you, our copy machine is broken down now, went down a few years ago. There is another copy machine down at the corner pharmacy, but I can’t let you leave with the book.”

She paced back to the front of the store, still thinking out loud. “They used to sell copies of this little booklet at the city library back in the 1980s. I bet they still have a few. But they aren’t open today. Let me think. The man who wrote this is dead, but his brother is still alive. He just turned 102! Let me see.” She grabbed the white pages and thumbed through them. “Oh here he is, hang on.”

And before I could protest, she was dialing the number, which I could hear ring twice. “Hi, yes, Janet? Is Elmer there? Oh, he’s sleeping? I wanted to see if he had copies of his brother’s book, the World War II one. Yeah, I’m sure he has one, too. I can call back in a few hours.”

She gave me a consoling look. “Looks like you are all out of luck for now, but you could try again in a few hours when he’s awake.”

I smiled and said thank you, leaving some money in the “Donations Only” box on the counter, and asked her for a place to get a cup of coffee. She directed me a to a small diner down the street, and soon I had black coffee and a slice of homemade banana cream pie, set on my table whose hair was styled right out of a 1980s fashion magazine. I ate and sipped and listened to snippets of local conversation. A new dog, grandma’s new marriage, a planned visit from a cousin, an exchange of recipes. I watched the locals bond over pie and French fries and eggs and sausage and stacks of pancakes and just absorbed it all.

My brain flashed back again to that time in New Orleans when I had my fortune told, and the man said that I walk into a place and absorb its whole history and then carry it with me. I wondered what Delta must have been like in 1947 and 1975 and how those times differed from now.

I decided that in places like this, the roots were not far underneat the tree, easily exposed and firmly planted.