A Beginning or The End?

In a couple of weeks I will be traveling back to Indiana Pennsylvania to meet up with a friend of mine.  Sort of a little mini-reunion I guess.  I haven’t seen him for a while and we haven’t “hung out” and just had a chance to talk in a VERY long time.  And I think we could both use a weekend off.  So we’re meeting up in Indiana PA, where, incidentally, we met.

I think the fact that we met in Indiana isn’t really important.  I think we chose that place to spend the weekend together because it’s the only place that has common context for us. Otherwise our lives have been lived in entirely different places and in different ways and doing different things.  So we’re meeting there just because it sort of makes sense. We can both get away from our regular lives and spend time in a mutually agreeable place.

I look forward to this weekend, not only because I look forward to spending time with my friend. But also because it’s Indiana.  And Indiana Pennsylvania haunts me. 

I don’t know why it haunts me.  I didn’t live there for very long.  I didn’t do anything spectacular there (either good or bad, that I know of anyway). I even think I have identified the things from the 10 months I spent there that I was to take with me going forward. Relationships, what I learned or discovered, those sorts of things.

So why does that place have so many ghosts for me?  I don’t know the answer to that, but I hope to find out while I’m there.

It was a terrible time in my life. Possibly the first part of what was to become possibly the worst 2 years of my life. That may have something to do with it but I don’t feel this way about the other places I lived during those 2 years.

I feel a little like maybe I shouldn’t have been there, but at the same time I know that’s not true either.  I ended up there for a variety of reasons that make perfect sense and fit very neatly into how my fate progressed. 

It bugs me a lot, though, that while I ended up at IUP for reasons that make perfect sense, I had absolutely no direction once I got there.  No professors helped me create anything like a plan for my college career; I got little or no direction as to the classes I should or should not take; I got little or no direction as to how one should live on a college campus or WHERE one should live on a college campus; or what I was supposed to do with myself once I was there. It’s like the universe said “you need to go here” and then dumped me there and left me.  Like, What the hell?

So I floundered about trying to figure out what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing and hating every bloody minute of it.  Except that I didn’t hate every minute of it.  In some ways and at some times I rather enjoyed myself.  There were some parties that were fantastic.  There was theatre work that was awesome.  There were late nights playing pool in Gordon Hall that were just plain fun.  I have a few memories and stories that always make me smile.

But a lot of the recollections are pretty hazy.  I know they happened, and that they happened to me, but they could just as easily be someone else’s story that I stuck myself into.

There’s a few things about Indiana I remember VERY clearly.  I remember living in Shafer hall – 605 I think, with an incredibly evil girl named Becky as my roommate.  I don’t think I was ever as close to killing another human being as I was to killing her.  Or outwardly wishing she would die.  She was awful and cruel and mean and terrible and I wished she was come home so drunk one night that she would puke into her throat and aspirate and die.

I remember someone setting fire to my dorm door and how that completely freaked me out.  And then it pissed me off.  And then it made me feel stupid – in the same way as the cool kids making fun of me in the cafeteria at lunch would simultaneously piss me off and make me feel stupid and inferior.

I remember walking down what I think was Philadelphia street in a very cold March rain.  I don’t know where I was going — possibly to a friend’s house.  Though I’m sure I was uninvited and was planning to just show up and hang out.  Because I didn’t have many places to hang out – certainly not my dorm room with the evil roommate in question there.  And I was never really invited anywhere.  I was never really welcome anywhere, though I can’t say as there were that many places I was unwelcome.

Although…I don’t know.  I wasn’t very socially astute at the time and it’s possible I GROSSLY wore out my welcome in the places I spent so much time.  

I think that’s the one thing that bothers me.  I spend a lot of time looking like an idiot but generally I KNOW when I look like an idiot or when I’m annoying someone or staying a little too long somewhere.  And knowing makes it better for me because I can apologize or make up for it or try to be less intrusive.  I’m bothered by the idea that I did these things and had no clue.  And that again, behind the curtains and behind the palms are the whispers of “good lord why won’t she just leave?  Does she have no idea it’s time for her to go?  Doesn’t she know she wasn’t invited?  Wasn’t she taught any manners or social skills?  How could she be so clueless.”

Ugh.

It’s cold and rainy today so maybe that’s what made me think of it.  I just remember that day in March.  Cold, rain, and nowhere to go.

Don’t get me wrong.  There were some very important GOOD things that came out of IUP for me.  First, there are the few friends I did make there.  One of whom is the very good friend I’ll be meeting there and he has been a mentor to me for a lot of my life and for that I am ever grateful.  The other friends I made were really more acquaintances at the time, but they have cropped up again in my life and it’s nice to have them around because I think I can learn some things from them. Maybe I can teach them a thing or two as well, but that’s being presumptuous.  I’ll just let them be and see where things end up.  I don’t need a mold for my friends or a reason to have them anymore.  Just nice to know they’re there.

Second, I learned that a life on stage was not going to be for me.  I can’t act.  Not really.  And that’s a lesson best learned in college at 18 instead of starving in a roach-infested basement apartment in New York City or Hollywood when you’re middle aged.  I sort of wish I’d learned more in the ways of stagecraft, but again, I don’t think that was to be my path.  For whatever reason.

Third, there was Jesse Bright.  She taught the Comp 101 class I took.  She assigned us essays that I would look at and not quite get what she wanted, so I wrote around them, getting more or less to the point she asked for but not really getting there.  And I aced every one of them. Jesse Bright told me I had a very good “voice.”  I had no idea what that meant. Not until much later.

But this statement and knowledge eventually led me to the path that got me to here and now.  Providing me with the leisure and opportunity to look at how I got here.  That’s kind of a lot.  Thanks Jesse.

So ultimately what I come up with is that the direction my life has taken and my getting here all started in Indiana Pennsylvania.  Yes there were choices and decisions that I made after then that shaped my path, but it all really started there.

I haven’t been back there since the spring of 1989 when I stayed there for a weekend with the same friend I’m meeting in a few weeks.  And at the time, the ghosts of IUP weren’t there for me yet.  Probably because I was still rather an idiot and for certain because I hadn’t left for long enough yet for the place to become haunted.

So now I am going back there and an exciting thought occurred to me.  What if this trip to IUP is necessary to launch the next segment of my life?  What if this trip is less about closing the door on that chapter of my life as it is about finding the key to opening the next chapter?

Maybe that’s optimistic and it’s definitely a lot to ask of three days in May.

But stranger things have happened. To me anyway.