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Twenty-one: All Grown Up

/ Gerry Wilson / 12 Comments

Engaged!

At Christmas break during my senior year in college, I was given an engagement ring. It’s what we did back then. If you didn’t get a ring at Christmas, your entire future clouded over. Well, I got my ring from the blue-eyed boy, who had graduated in three years and two summers and gone on to medical school.

So I was spending my senior year “alone,” except for occasional sanctioned dates with a fraternity brother of his who escorted me to parties. Medical school didn’t leave a lot of time for traveling the three hours back to campus to see me, and it seemed that when he did come (I think of him as just a boy then; we were both so young, so young), I would romanticize the time we’d spend together, and he would be exhausted from the study-grind of a first-year med student. Often, we argued, because my expectations far exceeded the reality.

And yet we planned a wedding. I graduated in May. We were married the end of June.

Daughter to Wife

Many girls of that generation went straight from daddy’s house to husband’s, from being daughter to being wife.

There were signs I should have recognized. The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, we fought. I chalked it up to pre-wedding jitters. Deep down, I think I knew something was fundamentally wrong, but I closed my mind to it. We went through with the wedding. It rained that day. My grandmother shook her head and said rain on your wedding day was a bad sign. Maybe she was right.

The finishing touch. Notice the curly bangs (humidity).

A Dose of Reality

We had been married two weeks when my young husband’s parents were seriously injured in an automobile accident. My husband had just started his summer job in a lab at the medical center, and I had a job with the telephone company in an engineering office where I learned to write specifications for new telephone installations. (Yes, with English and psychology majors, that was where I wound up. It was considered a fine job for a young woman fresh out of college.)

We dropped everything and went to Nashville where his parents were hospitalized, and we spent much of the summer traveling back and forth. We didn’t have a lot of time to settle in as newlyweds, and we had been married about three months when my father-in-law died. He was forty-eight years old. My husband’s mother recovered, but it was a long, slow process. In the fall, my husband went back to school for his second year, which wasn’t quite as hard as the first. I went on with my “plum” job at the phone company that paid me about half as much as my male counterparts.

So that was my introduction to marriage and to deep loss, almost simultaneously.

The Little Junk-store House

I should add that we loved our first apartment in a duplex on St. Mary Street.  We had furnished it with junk store finds. That little place is still vivid in my mind: the dark paneled walls, built-in bookcases, hardwood floors, big windows in the living room that let in lots of light, a rather primitive kitchen (which didn’t matter because I–almost literally–couldn’t boil water!), a sunny bedroom, and a tiny room that could become a nursery.

We were happy there.

Where were you at twenty-one? Were you settling down, or striking out on an adventure?

We are closing in on the end of the twenty-five memoir posts in the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge. Just a few more to go . . . I wouldn’t have thought it possible! Thanks for sparking the memories, Jane Ann McLachlan.

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.