page8
fathom
friday, april 25, 1980
By Peg Sheldrick
This is really more about consequences
than decisions, but consequences are part
of what makes decisions difficult, and so
are related.
First, let me say that I have always been
a "good student. I never worked parti
cularly hard at it, or at least never felt like
I did, but I was always a good student.
I always figured one of these years
they'd find out I wasn't as smart as they
seemed to think I was. But they never did.
The good student image persisted.
It carried me along from kindergarten
through elementary school, to junior high
and high school, and even into college.
Through four years it held on, giving me a
safe, familiar role to play. '
I was still playing the second semester
of my senior year - 365 days ago- when
the end of that particular stretch of road
came into sight.
That I should pass immediately to
graduate school and further scale the
heights of academia was manifestly clear to
some members of my family. But for me,
for the first time in a long time, the
answers weren't so clear.
But for me the answers
weren't so clear
I put off inquiring about grad schools
'til it was too late. I took my G RE on the
last possible date and looked at my scores
only once when they came back. Little by
little the knowledge grew inside me that I
would not be going to graduate school.
I felt guilty about family and friends
unfulfilled expectations even before the
last ceremony.
I remember my graduation in snatches;
mostly I remember the unspoken tensions
of that day. The woman in the robe who
strode to the stage, head bowed to hold the
mortar board in place, seemed then and
seems now like another person, the
quintessential paper chaser, keenly aware
of being all dressed up with no place to go
after stepping off the garlanded platform.
That figure in the robe has followed me
through the year since, and even now ling
ers in a cardboard frame on my desk.
The face in the picture smiles but the
muscles are flexed just a bit too tight, the
eyes squint too far closed, arm is tightly
clasped around a friend who will be leaving
too soon and a moment that will not last.
After the day of that picture, the wo
man in the robe would reappear every now
and then, silently summing up what I had
left behind.
She chased me through the summer, to
Minneapolis, to Winnipeg. I found her wait
ing in my parents' home when ! came for a
visit. She lingered in the odd comers of my
old apartment when I returned from travel
ing. At night in the shadow of her black
robe, I woulaV search my ceiling through
wet eyes for "the answers I still lacked.
Gradually I found that I could push her
from my thoughts by focusing on work
and people directly in front of me. If I
didn't look too far ahead or back, she left
me for awhile. And I found that the "real
world" was the same place I had always
been, that activity and inactivity are only
as empty as you allow them to be.
I found myself shying away from com
mitments, taking work as a temporary
secretary one month, a warehouse worker
another.
After long thought I re-entered classes
as an extension student, studying at night
things I never tried to learn the four years
of days before. I found my way back to
the university, to a side of it I hadn't seen
before.
Finally I came far enough back to reach
a particular room in a particular basement,
full of familiar typewriters and unfamiliar
faces. Through an act of kindness I found
The decision not to take the
obvious course was not an
easy one to make or live with
my way back to the printed page. I was
given a reason to sit down once a week and
write.
Gradually it gave me back some self
respect. A simple requirement. "A poor
thing, but mine own," to quote a friend.
But it has made the difference.
This small business, this call for sixty
lines once a week, has pierced inward dark
ness and through this pinprick has come a
camera obscura look at what lies outside, a
notion of where I would like to be. It
would not have come to me, I think, in the
halls of the dusty libraries my former path
of the last resistance was leading me to.
In some ways it is as if the ceremony
last spring never happened. Last week,
tucked in the corner of a jewelry box, I ran
across the honors medallion I wore; the
same day the headline on my column refer
red to me as "graduating."
The year has been painful emotionally,
difficult financially, but satisfying inward
ly. The untidy stack of yellowing news
print cluttering the fdotlocker in my room
means as much to me as the sheet of uni
versity bond handsomely mounted in Us
red folder they handed me last spring.
The decision not to take the obvious
course was not an easy one to make or to
live -with; some would see it ?.s an avoid
ance of a decision. But I am no longer
plunging ahead without questions. I'm not
running scared ; neither am I standing still.
The woman in the robe is still with me,
but we travel together now, instead of one
fleeing the other. Where we will go from
here remains to be seen. All I know is that
I don't have any more doubts or regrets
about where I've been.