20 Greastest Hits / The Climax Blues Band
The first clue I had that I might not be the crazy one came in college. Of course, as an adult, looking back, there were many incidents. But no matter how large the writings on the wall it was always difficult to see.
My entire first college experience was a disaster. I was ill prepared, naïve, and utterly clueless. Thanks to a lack of guidance counseling, I had chosen a “party school,” a term that I was completely unaware of, and learned from my English professor.
“Why are you here?” The middle aged man, asked me with a frown, one day after class as I had approached him with a question about an assignment and an apology for a missed class.
“I missed last Thursday. I’m sorry, I just wanted to make sure there was no changes to…” I tried to explain again.
“No. Why are you Here? At this school. You DO know it’s a party school, right?”
“What’s a party school?” I looked at him blankly, though I’m certain my face went on to horror stricken as he went on to explain.
By that point, it wasn’t really a surprise. I had lived three weeks in the dorm. I knew intimately what he was talking about. I had been lost by the fact that there were no late night philosophical discussions like I thought were supposed to happen in college. But I had presumed that this discrepancy between my expectations and reality were due to some obscure variable. Or, like I had in so many other things in life, presumed that it was some how my failing. I had yet to find the right crowd or had happened into the wrong dorm. That the entire school could be known for what I then considered bad and irresponsible behavior floored me. And I was receiving this insight from a person who taught there?
“It was close and relatively small.” I finally answered my professor weakly. It was the truth. There would have been several other options that would have fit that bill. Options that were not “party schools,” options that I probably would have loved and excelled in, but I didn’t know about them then and no one had mentioned it.
“Transfer.” He said to me, shaking his head and leaving the room.
In addition to not fitting in either in the social or ‘academic’ scene at the school, my heart was not in it. I was in my second year of being very attached to a young man who was still ‘back home.’
D. and I could not have been more different if we had been created with such in mind. We barely got along because of it. However, we were both lost souls. He was one of eight children, not the oldest, youngest, brightest… He lived in a house with no running hot water, where most food came from his father’s rifle.
I was the only child of a divorced professional woman, in a time period where that notion was novel even among the cosmopolitan. I grew up with culture and freedom and the surety that I was capable of doing anything that could only be fueled by naiveté and ignorance.
My strongly atheist, sometimes Jewish, sometimes Buddhist upbringing was outright blasphemous compared to his strict Baptist household. The first Christmas I explained I didn’t celebrate, he explained they always had birthday cake. He had never left the town line limits and was proud of that, I was planning on moving to New York City the moment I was legally able to leave and had declared the first and then only place where I felt at home had been Hicksville, Long Island.
I think for him, I was an oddity. A rare bird that offered guided tours to a land he’d only seen on television. It was with me he drove on a highway; with me took his first trip to a restaurant. For me, he was the first person to seemingly offer unconditional support and praise. Of course he told me I was smart and pretty, but more importantly, if I said, ‘I need…’ He would at least try to accommodate and he never once hung up on me.
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