Month: October 2012

At Nineteen: Already a Has-been?

/ Gerry Wilson / 11 Comments

I have news: the Sophomore Slump isn’t a myth. I know. I lived it.

After a pretty exciting first year of college, at the start of my sophomore year, I hit the slide. Oh, I was going out some, but there wasn’t anybody special. Generally, life was good. I liked my classes, and I wasn’t as anxious about grades as I had been during my freshman year. But my social life slowed way down.

I was living with two other girls–that’s right; three of us crammed into a room meant for two. We had a set of bunk beds plus one other, and one closet for all of us. But we were great friends. I guess we had to be! One roommate was a morning person who, the instant the alarm went off, leapt out of bed with “Good morning! How’s everybody this morning?” (I cannot italicize that word enough to give it the proper emphasis!) I would groan and roll over, dying for just five more minutes of sleep. She was also the one who, when she answered the hall phone and it was for me–yes, there was just one pay phone for the entire floor–would scream, “Goochie! Phoo-oone!” at the top of her lungs. I didn’t like being called “Goochie.” But I loved my roommates, anyway. I still do.

This is what our room sometimes looked like:

After the ball is over . . .

But that doesn’t address the slump. I dated a football player briefly that fall. He thought he was God. (I knew how to pick ’em, didn’t I?) He took me to a drive-in movie and ran over the speaker. He asked me to be his date to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Do I need to explain to you what a huge deal that was? My parents didn’t understand it. They refused to let me go. The Big Football Player didn’t call me again, and I was crushed.

There was this other guy, though. He’d cut in at a dance back in the fall, and one afternoon after class, he offered me a ride to my dorm in his white convertible. He didn’t call me until the spring, and I thought he’d forgotten all about me. When he picked me up for our first date, he was driving an old Ford, not a convertible. A bird had hit the front grille, and he hadn’t been able to get the dead bird out. That car smelled awful! It turned out the convertible belonged to his sister. By then, it didn’t matter. He was a pre-med student, a Mississippi Delta boy with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen and a great smile. He wasn’t handsome, exactly, but those eyes. He was intelligent. He loved books and music. He had a great future.

If you had handed me a checklist of all the things I was supposed to look for in a mate, I would have checked all of them off. I’d been schooled in the primary goal, you see: to find somebody to marry who would give me smart children and provide for me well. My college degree was like a trophy. I wasn’t really expected to do anything with it, although my father had advised me to get a teacher’s license so that if something happened, I could take care of myself.

This New Boy and I dated the rest of our sophomore spring. I won’t tell you the end of the story. Not yet.

At what point did your life take a turn that would determine your future? Were you aware of its importance at the time?

Thanks to Jane Ann McLachlan for bringing us the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge!

Eighteen: The Frosh Year

/ Gerry Wilson / 6 Comments

Scared to Death!

And so the girl went off to college! I’d been given a terrific scholarship, but I figured I was woefully unprepared for college courses, coming out of my small high school. For the first time in my life, I had to study hard.

The English and lit courses, though, I adored. A professor named Charles Noyes taught my freshman English Comp class. Dr. Noyes loved his pretty girl students (not in a dirty old man way) and tolerated the guys. He would perch on the edge of the desk with his pipe between his teeth, ask me a question, and listen, as though I had something remarkable to say. One of our writing topic choices (which I aced–wonder why?) was “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” I credit Dr. Noyes with giving me confidence and helping me discover my voice.

The freshman year wasn’t all grind. 

I’ll confess it: I went out for rush and pledged a sorority. Yes. I was an Ole Miss Sorority Girl. (What kinds of stories have you heard about that, I wonder? It seems Ole Miss girls are legendary.) That meant a whole new set of friends, meals and study nights at “the house,” work days, campus political campaigns, and volunteer activities. But it also meant fraternity swaps and parties and football games. In those days we got very dressed up for games: a suit, high heels, a hat, and a big mum corsage, accessorized by a frat-boy date. This was Hotty-Toddy land, the golden era of Johnny Vaught football. (If you never heard of Johnny Vaught, look him up. This was the year that LSU beat Ole Miss 7 to 3, courtesy of Billy Cannon’s 99-yard punt return.)

Roaring Twenties Party
(I made my flapper dress. And there really wasn’t any gin in that bathtub.)

Our freshman dorms were overflowing that year. I started out with two roommates, neither of whom I’d known before. By second semester, both were on academic probation, which meant they had to be in the dorm by six in the evening, so they would go out on dates in the afternoon. By sophomore year, they were both gone. There were no coed dorms in those days, and everybody had to be in at nine on weeknights. No pants or, God forbid, jeans except on Saturdays, and then we had to wear a raincoat over them. We had to sign in and sign out of the dorm. There were panty raids (No, Mother, I never threw anything out my window!) and romantic fraternity serenades when somebody got “pinned.” It was a wondrous time.

Free!

There was still the shadow of The Old Boyfriend, who had transferred to Ole Miss that year. We had agreed to date others, right? But he was possessive, and he acted out if I showed up at a party with somebody else. He flunked out after a semester and was gone. (He will reappear once more in these stories. Stay tuned.)

Then, I was free. I was having the time of my life.

When were you on your own? College? Working? Military? Tell me what your leaving home was like.

The memory quest continues with Jane Ann McLachlan’s Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge through the month of October. Go over to Jane’s site and have a look at other bloggers who have dared to meet the challenge.

Age Seventeen: On the Cusp

/ Gerry Wilson / 24 Comments

Senior year. Another diary.

I pour my heart out about the New Boy, the dangerous one, the one who wants to park on a country road where the kudzu takes on monstrous shapes on a moonlit night. We stay out past my curfew, arriving at the house to find Daddy standing on the porch, watching for me.

Kudzu
Image by LightScribe at iStockPhoto.com

Here’s a bit of fiction inspired by this time, this Boy (from my first novel):

On a sweltering July night almost a year to the day after Terry killed the snake, Lydia and Terry parked in his daddy’s pickup on a dirt road not far from his house. Under the full moon the trees, overgrown with kudzu, took on life.

“Look at that one,” Lydia said. “It’s an angry cat with its back arched. And see those over there? That’s a castle with turrets.”

“Turrets?”

She poked him in the ribs. “You know what turrets are. They’re those little tops on castle walls.”

“Oh, those.” He leaned across and looked out the window on her side. “Hey, look at that!” He pointed up. “You see the tall one, right there? Looks like it has arms? That’s my daddy coming after me.”

Lydia touched his face. “He doesn’t really do that, does he?”

“Not like he used to.” He kissed her. “Let’s not talk about him.”

Quiet except for the kissing and the crickets and the frogs, the call of an owl and an answer deep in the woods, a moth against the windshield, a mosquito’s whine, Lydia’s thrumming heart.

The old Boy is still around, still mercurial. He asks somebody else to be his partner on Dance Party (a teen dance competition televised in a nearby town) and just about breaks my heart. I’m a good dancer; why not me? He and the other girl win, that’s why. He’s in junior college, so he’s not around all the time. He and I go out on Saturday nights and then stay up late in my pine-paneled den, watching horror movies on TV. A life-sized painting of me, dressed in a harlequin outfit, dominates the room. It’s a Christmas gift from an artist-cousin. My mother hates it, my dad hates it, but they don’t have the courage not to hang it and hurt my cousin’s feelings, so we live with that thing. I live with it, this strange, corrupted image of me. But it doesn’t keep the Boy and me from cuddling and kissing on the couch until my dad comes up the back hall to the kitchen with much loud throat-clearing. Then we know; it’s time for the Boy to go home.

Because the Boy has graduated, he isn’t eligible to take me to the prom, so I go with somebody else. This is the date who does not speak three words all night. I try, I swear. He’s a handsome guy (he is the most handsome guy, as I recall, in the yearbook). We have nothing to say to each other. We have nothing in common.

This is not the dangerous Boy. The dangerous Boy is for summer nights. He’s a thrill, an escape from my good-girl life. He has these piercing brown eyes. He exudes heat and light. But I break up with him, and within weeks, he’s dating my best friend. 

Valedictory address. I didn’t know about cliches then.

After all, I am still the golden girl. I have to measure up. I’m class valedictorian. I’ll be the first person in my family to go to college. A nice scholarship seals the deal: Ole Miss, only thirty miles from home, so I’ll still be tethered pretty tightly. The Boy and I decide to date other people. It makes sense, right?

Do you ever think about the roads not taken–the decisions you made that impacted the direction of your life? Who might you be now, if you had gone down that other road?

This entry continues the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge. Getting tired of hearing about me? I hope not. I’m enjoying exploring these early memories, looking for fiction possibilities.