Once when I was 19, the summer after my first year of college, I made the mistake of going home again.
I’d been leaving home in one way or another since I was eleven–had been living with boyfriends off and on since I was 15–but at 18 had surprised everyone, most of all me, and got into a decent college and left the state.
What’s more, I went to a Quaker college in Pennsylvania, which meant I was surrounded by the kind of squares whose parents loved them and whose idea of fashion was Dockers and college logos. The music was Cat Stevens and Jimmy Buffett, the colors were grey and that green that has so much grey in it that it might as well go ahead and be grey. And I just about lost my mind.
I never really came around on that school socially–in my senior year, I was the butt of a class night joke in which they insulted my boyfriend’s taste in women–but that first year I hated the tyranny of their grey-greenness with such a punk-rock heat that they hated me with an equal fervor.
It was probably the least grey-green thing about them.
But I had been told by my grandmother that if I didn’t attend this particular school I’d be dead by 27. She told me six months after she died, which is how I knew she meant business. She hadn’t been that involved in my goings-ons while she was alive. Continue Reading →
