he'd told me there would be funds to cover. The final straw that pushed me to move was an incident where one of my roommates had used my room for sex while I was out studying at the library. This guy had a reputation for being the sort that was naturally horizontal. However, his activities had cost me a night's sleep before a big test in engineering. In my opinion, it had been the reason I'd gotten a C on the final. It dropped my overall grade for the course to a mid B. That was actually a little higher than the previous semester's engineering course, but I felt as though I should be making A's in my major.
So I spent the last week of May moving into my new efficiency and, when June came, I flew to Vienna to meet up with Dad and Aunt Katie. From there, we went off to several different cities and had a great trip. It was a very enlightening trip in many respects; I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about Dad and Aunt Katie, as well.
One of the side-benefits of the trip was that I had time to get Dad's honest input on the possibility of my chancing my major. Since he was an engineer, I'd expected him to balk at my idea of switching my major to biology, but he was actually super supportive! His words had been, "Tommy, I'm still putting money in your college 529 and personal funds. You need to make sure you really like what you are preparing to do in life. Get that right, everything else is gravy."
Well, that's my version of it. Dad has an odd way of speaking, to my way of thinking. I spent most of my 'growing-up years' in Texas, while Dad was raised in North Carolina, so we have slightly different vocabularies. When Mom left Dad, she moved us to Austin, and my use of colorful Texas colloquialisms increased dramatically. Lately, though, I've noticed my language skills are changing - most likely the result of my remedial English classes. I find myself working constantly to adjust my speech and writing. Now that I think about it Dad would never have used the word,
gravy
. In fact, I was starting to drop it from my vocabulary, too.
My Texas drawl had gotten me some sideways glances, my first few months on campus. It garnered some chuckles in English class, as well. Funny thing was, I was born in North Carolina, not too far from campus. On top of that, my accent had started to change to match the surrounding people fairly quickly, too. I'd bet money that most folks from up north couldn't tell a Texan from a Tar Heel, just by listening to them speak. When I hear someone from either place, it's pretty clear, at least to me.
Still, there's speaking, and then there's writing. I very quickly learned that most of my writing, in college, would be of a more technical nature, and there was no room for colloquialisms in such documents. As for speaking, I simply disliked feeling self-conscious when the instructor - or my classmates - looked strangely at me because of my choice of words when I gave an answer to a question posed in class.
One day in class last spring, while giving an answer to a question, I used the phrase, 'rode hard and put away wet'. After the students settled from their belly laughs, the professor had me spend several minutes explaining myself. I worked hard to share the concept of the proper care of horses, before the instructor caught on that the phrase - one that any Texan would easily understand - was another way of saying 'mistreated' or 'abused.' Then he explained to me that around here term had a more vulgar meaning in the students' vernacular. I thought about it a bit and realized the two meanings might not be all that different.
After returning from Europe, I found two experiences similar. Coupled together they both encouraged me to improve my ability to communicate and become more aggressive with my language and accent adjustments. I honestly liked hearing all the different accents I was exposed to, on campus. The thing is, accents can identify you with a particular place, and that can lead to your being incorrectly 'pegged' as being of a particular intellectual level, often a low one. So I listened to the sounds of the voices around me, and worked hard at minimizing my south-Texas drawl. I even fantasized that I might lose my accent, all together, while pursuing an advanced degree up north somewhere.
Dan - my father, and Pete - my stepfather, couldn't be more different. Pete can strut sitting down, but can usually barely afford to put beer in the fridge. 'Barely afford' means that he does it, and then complains about anything else he has to buy.
Dan makes really good money, working as an engineer out on the oil platforms in the Gulf, and his month-on, month-off schedule doesn't give him as much time to go spending it as most folks with 'normal' jobs have. He doesn't flaunt his money, though, like some folks do. He's got a fancy house, with a pool, down on the Gulf, but he says it's just a house - a place for him to keep his stuff. Maybe he's right, and it just seems like a fancy mansion to me, compared to the double-wide Mom and Pete have, just outside of Austin.
Dad always looks forward to having me visit for at least a month, in the summer, and a week or two every other Christmas. He's kept my bedroom, there, just like it was when I lived with him. It is a place that is just mine and didn't have to do double-duty as some other sort of room, despite the fact that I only spent a few weeks out of the year sleeping in it.
As far as I could tell, Dad - Dan - was a good man. I can't recall him ever having a cross word for Mom, even after their divorce. Considering the fact that she cheated on him, and left him to run off with another man, that's downright saintly. Even Dad's version of their meeting gave Mom more credit than she probably deserved. The story went like this: He met this cute redhead on one of his computer gigs. She was 'in charge of' the computer database at a mom and pop electronics store. That was probably generous, too. I suspect she was just the one that did all the data entry, 'cause that's what she does now. He said she was taking some night classes at one of the community colleges and needed some 'tutoring'. The only words he used, that even approached casting a negative light on Mom, were still shaded with kindness. It was his description of how I'd been conceived.
"We'd been dating for about two months when Miss Launa Duinerua 'forgot' to take her pills and I knocked her up with you. It wasn't quite a shotgun wedding, but it was close."
Pete was the kind of guy that you can't tell anything. To him, even my questions were wrong. I guess he fits that adage:
You can always tell a Texan, but you can't tell him much.
Dan was pretty much the opposite in that regard. I could talk to him about damn near anything; he was a listener. When I was a little dude he took time to read to me, listen to my questions, and make sure I understood things in my classes. It set me up to a great start on my education.
Mom was cut from a different cloth. She spoke almost as little about her parents as Dad did, his. Still, I'd heard enough bits of information, over a lot of conversations with her, to gather that her folks were a little on the harsh side. The way they treated her bordered on abusive, and she'd wanted to be out from under them. It seemed pretty inexplicable, but she had very few nice words for Dad even when they were married. After the divorce, she would cut him down in front of me, every chance she got. My Mom wasn't abusive to me, but she seemed to do things without considering their effect on me. I loved my Mom, after a fashion; she was my mother, after all. However, we were at odds more often than not. The God's honest truth was Launa
[Duinerua]
[Anderson]
Davis could start a fight in an empty house! Her dark red hair color seemed to personify her fiery moods.
Even as a kid, I understood why Dad's job took him away from us for a month at a stretch. He was trying to make our lives better than what he'd had, when he'd been a kid. He never talked about his childhood much but certain clues would pop out: how strict his father had been, how his dad never had any real time for him, and how poor they'd been. Dad was gone for a month, and then home for a month, on account of the fact that he worked on drilling rigs and oil platforms. He couldn't be home all the time but, when he was, he was all in. I guess Mom didn't get that. Dan worked hard so we would have a good life - and we did, right up until the day that Mom met Pete.
It might seem a little thing, to some folks, but the break-up of a marriage is never a little thing, and that's even truer when there are children involved. That was the biggest issue I had, with my Mom. I thought that her leaving Dan, for Pete, was a bad choice from the get go. She treated me like a naïve thirteen year old at the time, but I knew it was a raw deal and told her so. I was being ripped away from a truly good man who tried his best to be an excellent dad to me.
