A classic Xmas dinner; truly a treat. I was selected camera man again, which makes extra popular and lets me mingle without having to remember conversational details. Call it “a lot of pleasant trouble”. It was a feast of the usual proportions and this year I’ll get some better photos. JP and I made some last minute deliveries around the neighborhood until past dark, so my camera was useless. As you see by this temporary picture. Stet.
I’ll be nice this year and won’t write a social column. Instead, how about a few things that I internalize about real family gatherings, as opposed to the kind I knew. People have always told me I should have been a doctor, and I know it. Maybe it is time I explained my position on that. My education can be summed up as preferring the devil you know. I also had many illusions about doctors which is an inhibition itself for in small-town nowhere, nobody will help you.But I’m straying, so let me connect back to what’s happening now. Why am I thinking about education at a time like this? I forget Tamara's’s daughter’s name, but when I met her she was a 9 year old girl. Now she is 19 and flew in from law school in Washington, DC. I scarcely recognized her. But I certainly recognize the difference a year of college makes in a woman, by golly! I lament my own education was nothing like hers. She has never earned a dollar in her life nor will ever have to. What is it like to go to college under those circumstances? Why, it probably feels like Xmas all year.
My school cost me every youthful penny I had, plus interest. And I assure you I was not in the Capitol wearing Gucci shoes. The devil I didn’t know was when my parents would begin sending me they money they promised. It was a waiting game. That meant two choices. Get any kind of degree I could while living on student loans. Or commit to a (then $80,000) medical education that, because of the total cost, I might never be able to finish. As each semester passed, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage, for as I’ve said, student loans are enough to go to school, nothing more. Did you get that? Nothing more.
So don't go thinking of my college days as afternoons strolling the campus grounds, meeting the woman I would marry, and making life-long business contacts, playing intramural sports, swaggering into the student dining hall with my tennis racket or arms akimbo. Some say it is wrong to feel this way, I'm just telling you like it was. I walked to university because I didn't have bus fare. So there, I can tell my children I used to walk seven miles to "school" and be telling the truth. And it was uphill both ways.
[Author's note 2015-12-24: Boy, was I feeling sorry for myself six years ago. Hey, it could happen to anybody if you have seen what I've seen. I still claim to be the only person of my generation who walked to university, and the only one who studied computers by coal oil lamp. Don't go concluding there was anything cute about it.
But I was amused to spot the parallel with that degree and buying my retirement home. Do I buy something less than ideal to get my mitts on a sure thing now, or trust that the future will provide? I certainly now know which of those is choices closer to real life.]
By age twenty, the second-hand clothes I’d had since I was 15 were threadbare. Thank god people thought my ragged appearance was the hippy thing! No sense buying anything new, as it would just make the rest look even shabbier. Yet here was a 19 year old with a fraction of my learning ability who will have an advanced degree I could only have dreamed of, and frankly I felt jealous. You see, I had miscalculated when I was 18. Student loans cannot make up for lack of support from home, I had no more idea than any kid how much things really cost. How much a free ride normal parents provide. People who claim they’ve done it "on their own" are not adding up the true figures.
My marks plummeted as making ends meet turned into a constant struggle. I skidded by more than a few years on exuberance but soon what little infrastructure I had was carried on my back when I left home. And it was finally gone. What is it like to go to school without a care in the world? Your only concern is passing the few courses per semester, no sense taking a full course load, or even of getting high marks, since you won’t be needing any scholarship money. What is it like, indeed?
It was a grand Xmas dinner.
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