College Knowledge?

Primed and Ready to Fail

This is the picture of me on my college ID when I started going to South-West Texas State University (now Texas State University since 2003) in Fall of 1981. I left after the summer of 1985. Those numbers should tell you something before I even say it: I never graduated. Here’s the whole sad tale.

For starters, I never wanted to start that fall anyway. When I graduated from high school, I was still seventeen. What I wanted to do was to spend some time working and saving up money, going in better prepared. As it was, even though I had no guidance and no financial provision from my parents, by the end of summer I was hustled into college, like they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. The only advantage I can see now was that I hadn’t lost what little mathematical skills I had yet and was able to place out of having to take any math courses.

In the end I did have to get a student loan, which I promptly spent half of on getting a VCR player, then going for the enormous sum of $500 (or was it $700?). “The surest way to ruin someone who has never handled any money is to give him some.” – George Bernard Shaw. Still, with living in my grandmother’s storage room, walking several blocks to catch the shuttle bus, and coming home to work from Friday evening to Sunday evening, when Mike would drive us back (from Seguin to San Marcos, about 30 miles), I managed to scratch by, even using the university bookstore to order books that I’d had no access to before.

For it was in reading that I think I got most of my education in my college years. There was a good library that I haunted in the hours between classes, and I had at least three very good college professors: Dr. Walz in Shakespeare, Dr. Rosenbaum in Modern Poetry, and Dr. Laird in Middle English Literature. They all sharpened my reading skills, and my best hours in college were spent in their classes.

In the end, I was only lacking two credits to graduate, but for me they were tough nuts to crack. One was a Language credit. I took German, as I had no affinity for Spanish. I did so poorly in my first semester I was too discouraged to try it again. The other was for Speech Communications; with my crippling shyness I had special difficulties with that, but for a teaching degree, which seemed to be where I was heading, it was absolutely essential. I must have taken that class no less than five times over the years; twice I never showed up from the first day.

As I say, by the end of the summer of 1985 I gave it up as a bad job. By that time, they really needed me full time at home base anyway; Mom’s health had deteriorated greatly. I was stuck with making the minimum payments on that one student loan for years until one freak Bingo win allowed me to close it out. Since then, I’ve seldom given college a second thought, though they still occasionally try to stick me with Mike’s student loan bills.

I sometimes wonder what sort of sad alternative life I might have had if I had graduated, as opposed to the sad actual life I did and do lead. And I think about buying Lance Rye and Cheese Crackers (since largely discontinued) at the snack cart, of the abortive Writer’s Club we tried to get started, and of the time I accidentally wandered into the Women’s Residence looking to buy a pet rat. But that’s all I have to say on the subject of college for now.