A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Returning home wasn’t easy. I missed my new page friends and the energy and excitement of D.C. I remembered a Meridian friend of mine saying of an older guy we knew who had paged a few years before me, that he didn’t come back the same. He left as a kind of conservative lad in polos and khakis, yet returned as something of a bohemian with large holes in his jeans and a Baja hoodie. My friend thought that this guy’s politics had shifted as well. Before paging, he was the child of parents active in the Republican party; after, he was perceived as more of a liberal Democrat. Real weird changes, you know.
Although I hadn’t much changed my dress or my political affiliation, I wasn’t sure I was quite the same. How could I be after all the unique encounters I’d had in D.C.? How can any of us “be the same” after any new experience? One thing was for sure. I was no longer content to stay in Meridian, or Mississippi for that matter. And although I was especially fond of my family, I wasn’t quite sure how I could leave them again and hold onto them at the same time.
A large part of my senior year of high school was spent reminiscing, studying, playing tennis (our high school team won the state championships that year), participating in church youth activities, and searching for, visiting, and applying for colleges. This was before the internet, so I’m not exactly sure how I determined my list of schools in which I was interested. I mostly considered small liberal arts schools, many of them with United Methodist roots and affiliation. The farthest away, more of a fantasy, was Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage. I requested a catalog I think as a means of staking psychologically the outermost range of how far away I could imagine going.
My closest consideration was Millsaps College in Jackson - only ninety miles away. My mom attended Millsaps for her first two years of college before transferring to Ole Miss to be with my dad and pursue what she’d determined to be a more fitting major for her - elementary music education. I considered Ole Miss, although not wholeheartedly, even as it was my parents’ alma mater and I would have been considered a legacy. A recruiter even came to our house which seemed generous enough. But I couldn’t get past her perfect hair, makeup, perfume, and smarmy demeanor that I believed, rightly or not, would typify the collective climate at the University of Mississippi.
I’ve already said that I really didn’t want to stay in Mississippi anyway. And as reality sunk in, I also realized I didn’t want to attempt to go as far away as Alaska. Another option seemed to emerge out of the blue that was a little farther away than Millsaps, but in the complete opposite direction and beyond the border of Mississippi.
*Thanks for reading and/or listening. Continue to next post College Bound. To read from the beginning please go to Why I'm Writing in the Archive.
I love receiving your comments if you’d like to share publicly or just email me directly.
Looking forward to the next chapter!