My name is Fred. I am in graduate school in History at a Large Midwestern State University known for its outstanding basketball. I grew up in-state here in a mid-sized fallen industrial town. My town used to have factories. They are all in China now.
I'm a mongrel. A little Polish, German, English, Italian and whatever mix accumulated in the family tree over the past 140 years or so since whatever set of relatives passed through Ellis Island. One side of the family is Catholic. The other side is Baptist. I think we mostly went to Presbyterian Church growing up. Church taught me to be good and honest.
I am average height, average weight, average build. If you saw me walking around campus I would look like every other graduate student on campus. I have a bad haircut from some place at the mall. I have $99 glasses, but usually wear contacts. I played basketball growing up because every kid in my state plays ball. But I am no Jimmy Chitwood. I am more the Ollie type.
I have always been shy around girls. I was always too geeky smart for girls back in high school. I scared them away with too many books and too many big words. Or maybe I was to goody goody. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke. My folks didn't have a lot of money so we didn't play video games or go on fancy trips or go to Disney. I didn't have an I-pod or any of the other latest I-gadgets. We were pretty downwardly mobile blue-collar folks.
As I mentioned, I played ball when I was a kid. For fun to stay in shape. We all played ball, but I was not a jock guy. I still play ball over at the HPER with some pick up games and IMs.
I wasn't one of the pretty people in high school. And as I learned early on in the high school gym class locker room, I was poorly equipped in the "boy parts" category. I knew mine worked because I worked mine nearly every day with great success. I also did the back seat romp with my prom date and the occasional summer night grope with another girl. But the fact remained the boy parts were small compared to what you could see hanging off most of the other guys.
I was good with computers, but spent most of my time using my dad's Dell. I didn't have a fancy MAC. I didn't cruise porn sites. I wasn't on My Space or Facebook.
Mom and dad worked hard to send me to college. I was a good college kid. Mostly all A's. But I never really dated. I spent my Friday nights and Saturday nights at the library, not out at the Fraternities. I avoided girls. I think everyone but me was having lots of crazy sex.
I graduated summa cum laude and earned a fellowship to the History graduate program. My parents were excited. So was I. I was the first person in the family to earn a college degree and now was going to be the first with a Ph. D as well.
Then I met a girl. Her name is Sarah. Sarah and I had a class together. Sarah is a junior English major. In graduate school there are these mixed level introductory classes populated by new graduate students and upper level undergraduates. Without getting into all the complicated program requirements for undergraduates and graduate students that put me in the same class with Sarah, I'll just say we were both in a class outside of our field. The class was in Politics. Because we were both alien to the discipline neither of us knew most of the other folks in class. I took naturally to the subject and spoke often in class (which the professor seemed to like). Sarah struggled early on and the professor did not take well to her struggles.
Sarah introduced herself to me on an early September afternoon after the professor reamed her out for having "shallow thought" on the day's subject. Sarah was fighting back tears and asked how I, as a fellow alien, had managed to do so well. Sarah needed a friend.
I was flattered. Pretty girls did not seem to pay much attention to me, and geek smarts had not won me many admirers as an undergraduate or in high school.
About Sarah, she stood about 5' 4" with longish thick dark brown hair and deep brown eyes. She was well toned, like she had serious dance training. She was a B-cup who might have ambitions to grow into a C when she turned 30.
I managed to say something back to Sarah about reading a lot of books and being good with most of history since Eve bit the apple back in the Garden.
Sarah laughed. She invited herself to pick my brain and announced that I had no choice but to be her new study buddy. I agreed.
This was not a whirlwind romance.
Our class met on Wednesdays. Sarah and I started by getting together on Tuesday's for lunch. I usually brought a sandwich and an apple. Sarah usually had a yogurt and some kind of fruit. We were pretty disciplined and talked about the week's readings before the class met for the week. Sarah was an English major and active in the University's drama program. She was bright, but suffered from the modern undergraduate problem that she hadn't read anything. Tet, hadn't heard of it. Watergate, a mystery to her. Jimmy Carter, who was Cyrus Vance? Iranian hostage crisis? Who took the Iranians hostage? Menachem Begin? Wasn't he a terrorist or something? You get the idea.
By late October, Tuesdays turned into Tuesday pre-class meet and Wednesday after class dinner. We both lived in dorms. No one had a kitchen. We didn't have much cash so we did cheap off campus spaghetti special at a greasy Italian place.
In November Sarah panicked. She had a first draft of a paper due in our class and she was supposed to be "opening" in a black box production of a play in drama. Black Box productions are small. They are not main stage. Her part was not huge, but the play still meant a big time commitment each night while the play was up.
In crisis mode, Sarah's laptop moved to my dorm room. Sarah wanted ready access to my thoughts, an eye over he shoulder while she wrote, and my small library of books (it seemed to Sarah that I had read everything on the planet and owned a copy of it).
Did I mention that Sarah was a pretty good student herself? She had a spectacular GPA and had big plans for graduate school and beyond. In her mind A means average. B means bad. She was not a geek girl. She partied more than I ever did. But all in all she was a grind when she needed to grind.
Sarah's play turned out good. Ally, the lead in the play, was grateful that Sarah had been a trooper and took the play so seriously. Ally and Sarah were friends. The Black Box was supposed to feature Ally as a future professional star -- there were a few potential agents in the audience. Ally got some good agent leads from the production.
Sarah's paper draft was a hit with the professor. He commented (in red) that perhaps he was wrong early in the term when he accused her of laboring with the burden of "shitty thought."
Sarah finished the semester in style taking As in all of her classes.
Sarah was no longer camping in my room come Christmas break. I was surprised to find a Christmas card from Sarah waiting for me when I got home to my folks for break. Sarah wrote a sweet note about how I was the best part of her fall. She also called on Christmas and told me not to be a stranger come Spring term. She called again to wish me a Happy New year.
