There Is Hope

As I write, I'm keeping half an ear on the live youtube presentation of our grandniece's college graduation. She attended the same agricultural college that I did, she in Design and I in Medieval Studies. Unlike her Precious Auntie, our niece is a good student.

I made up for it in grad school, but I was such a punk in undergrad and still feel the shame. Eventually I managed a 3.1 gpa, but this was despite lots of dropped classes, incompletes galore...I was too shy to ask professors to read my final term paper, so I just didn't do it and my major advisor had to assemble a team at the last minute. They did not like my paper. It took me another year to clean up the mess and get a diploma.

My recollection of graduation day was the humidity. They had watered the lawn the night before, and that is where people were assembled. The early heat that day turned the lawn into a steamy mess and I thought I would faint. Also, if you see photos of me and my dad, you can see that I have bitten my fingers to the quick.  What a mess I made.

On the way home from the graduation ceremony my parents and I swung by my professor's house to pick up the final paper in question. As I recall I got a C-. And I also recall that the ride back to where I lived was one truly miserable hour. I disappointed my parents. I disappointed myself. I don't recall that we ate a meal together to mark the occasion. They returned me to my apartment, which was an end-of-the-quarter catastrophe.

Over the next year I did eventually finish my degree, studying hard. I recall that I had to resubmit my final paper on Sverri Sigurdsen. And that I had to hire a grad student to help me with the computer. I'd drive the hour to school, let myself into my advisor's office, and work with the grad student to format my paper. First we'd dial up the mainframe, using the modem (calling the phone number and then placing the phone handset into the rubber holes that snugly fit around it). Then we'd call up the file and use nroff (a text editing program) to mark up the paper. When I later learned html, it made perfect sense to me because this was also how nroff worked, requiring that you turn on and then turn off formatting commands with text commands. It got so hot in the summer in that college town, and the portable holding my advisor's office would heat up mightily.

Still, we got it done. Then I had to write papers about Dietrich Bonhoffer for my religion class, and then finally I had five more units to come up with. For that I went to a community college and took American History, and met a musician who introduced me to another musician, and that led me to mrguy years later, and here we are.

Later, when I needed to go to grad school, I had purpose and drive and interest, and it was a whole different ball of wax. My family gladly attended my graduation, and when I finished, I finished. For this reason I say that there is hope.

A Final Note: I guess I should say that my mom was later proud of me (that's after my undergrad years and before the dementia, when she started calling me a fat sexpot!). She liked to tell everyone that I was her baby, and to tell people where I worked. And even though she and my dad didn't approve of my being a musician, she liked telling me every time she heard me on the radio or saw the guy I sang with on tv. And I was lucky enough to be profiled on my community college library program website, and to be invited back most years to talk about my journey from being a lapsed Medievalist / waitress / bass player to working at the forklift factory. When the Nasa astronaut kicked off the commencement address today by talking about the five principles his father shared with him that he lived by, those all resonated with me as the things I have shared when I have given my own commencement address.