Fifty years ago, I was a new high school graduate planning to enter college for the fall semester. That summer, I had no idea what I was doing and what was ahead. Looking back, that was a good thing.
Much of my family life was collapsing, but I believed all would be fine. I have a habit of seeing the bright side.
Here is the short version. The day after I graduated from high school, my stepfather moved out of our house. In my eyes, he was my father. He had been looking after me since I was in fifth grade.
I spent the summer working for him at his paint and body shop, as usual. It was a job I knew well and enjoyed. I was sad and stressed by the end of my mother’s marriage with my stepfather. But, continuing to work with my stepfather helped me to pretend that my life was not falling apart.
Reality hit me early in my first semester of college. I realized that the man I considered my father was not going to help me with college expenses. I was on my own as far as I could see. I do not write this in condemnation of him. While my relationship with him fell apart at that time, I started to see him occasionally many years later and I have expressed to him several times how much I appreciate all he taught me when I was growing up.
That summer, though, I believed good things were ahead and others told me that was true. As I was graduating from high school, I confided in my school principal that my home life was crashing. I told him that I was reluctant to leave for college. I wondered if I should stay home and take care of my mother. He urged me to go to college. He told me that I had potential, that I stood a good chance of doing well in life with a good education. My mother would work things out, he assured me.
I had dreams that summer. I believed that I would go to college and prepare myself for life as a journalist and, perhaps, a writer of short stories and novels.
I should admit here that I knew next to nothing about college. I knew that I liked walking on college campuses. When I was a child in Texarkana, I was fascinated with Texarkana College, which was near where my grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived.
In Tyler, where we moved when I was 10, I was impressed with Tyler Junior College. I felt at home at such places. I had it in my mind that I would go to college when I grew up.
But, I had never seen East Texas State University (now Texas A&M Commerce) before I moved into my residence hall in late August 1972. I do not know why I did not get into my 1965 Chevrolet Impala and drive over there just to look around, at least. Oh, well, I had plenty to learn. In many ways.
I managed to spend little time in my house that summer. I was at work or out with friends. I slept in my room, but I stayed away other times. I realize now it made it easier to ignore the sadness in my home. I was surviving.
Some of that summer is so sad I still cannot write about it. My mom was struggling, trying in her own way to survive. I realize now that I did not know how to help. So, I was focused on my own efforts to get by.
My summer had started with the dissolution of my family as I knew it, but I was becoming familiar with family I did not know, too. Days after graduation, I visited with my father in Georgia. I was only vaguely familiar with him. He and my mother divorced when I was around four and he moved to the East Coast. He had no involvement in raising me after that time and I saw him only once, for a few hours, until I was deep into my teens.
My visit in Georgia went well. I would go back to see him at Christmas.That summer, I did not know how important those visits would prove to be.
Looking back at that pivotal point in my life, what I think about is how I believed without doubt that summer that I would go to college, finish in four years, do well and move on. That is how it went, it turned out.
I was able to get through that first semester of college with money I had saved from working for my stepfather. When I visited my father at Christmas, he told me that he wanted to help me with college and he did. I appreciated it then and now.
I do not want to make it appear that the entire summer was bad and sad. I had a good time with friends, including one who is a great friend to this day. And, I felt strongly for the first time that I was grown.
I realize now that I took the same approach often in life as the years went by. I believed I could do whatever I dreamed. That includes marriage and family, graduate school, jobs I enjoyed, and so on. I usually did not know what challenges were ahead through all of those experiences. It is better that I did not, I think. I simply believed and did the work to make something good happen.
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