There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
–In My Life/the Beatles
It’s always a little bit melancholy coming back to Portland from home. Not so much because I miss Springfield as a place. Actually not that I miss the place at all–I wouldn’t want to live there again. It’s home, but it’s never been the right place for me. Or maybe at the time, I wouldn’t have been right in any place I lived. That’s probably closer to the truth.
When I left home for the first time, I was 17 years old.
That sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? Like I was a desperate runaway. Well, sort of. I was running away, but I did have the excuse of it being to go to college.
In my Junior year of high school, what I really wanted was to stay out of college until I had some clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. I thought I could just get a crappy job for a year or two until I sorted it out. This did not meet with parental approval, or rather only partially.
“I will pay for you to go to any college you can get into, in any place,but only if you go right after graduation. If you want to take time off after high school, you can pay for college yourself.”
OK, Dad. College it is.
Any school I want? Anywhere? I always did enjoy a challenge. Boston. Boston would be great. So off I went to make a huge whopping dent in the parental wallet while studying…what? Hell if I knew. As it turned out, I was only there for about 5 months. I kept busy though. I managed to take 4 or 5 classes, improve my Spanish dramatically, find out that guys outside of my home town thought I was cute, get my heart broken again, lose a lot of weight and discover a heretofore undiscovered gift for sluttiness.
If love just isn’t working out, there’s always sex.
Just what every 17 year old should know.
Later, of course, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but 17 year olds are not known for the ability to resolve complex emotional issues in wise ways. I may have had even more of a gift for stupid emotional decisions than my peers.
Book smart, etc.
I can’t say I’m all that much better with emotional decisions now, but at least I recognize it. Progress?
Back in Springfield for the Christmas holiday, I ended up in the hospital for a crispy-fried arm acquired making popcorn one night. I missed a term for a couple of surgeries and post-burn occupational therapy and ended up at Oregon for Summer term with a very fetching therapeutic glove on my left arm.
Actually, it wasn’t too bad.
This might have been where I started to develop what I referred to later as optimistic pessimism. I was grateful it was only my hand and arm that were burned, and although I was sad about not going back to Boston I didn’t mind having to stay home and go to Oregon too terribly.
I also got to be very good at driving a Cadillac one-handed. Most people can’t say that.
So, that Spring I drove my Dad’s Caddie down to Mac Court to sign up for a couple of classes. Just something to keep me busy over the Summer while I was still doing therapy.
My plan was to take an intensive Russian class and Spanish. Or was it swimming? There was no one at the registration table for the Russian department though. As I loitered around waiting, I started chatting with the very attractive man at the Italian registration table. A very attractive Italian man. He mentioned that there was an intensive Italian class that Summer. A full year of Italian in two months. If I had an aptitude for languages, it should be easy.
He was teaching the first part.
Hmm…
That might be fun….
And it was.
