~a column about Jefferson by Colleen O’Brien
When the day finally arrived that I got to go home from college my freshman year, I felt like I’d been a stranger in a strange land for three years instead of three months. The only time I’d been away from home prior to my 18th year was to spend a week each summer at my grandparents’ in Perry and a couple of years of one July week at Camp Hantesa when I was nine and 10.
Those first 12 weeks of college were an eternity of learning way too many things before I had any interest in learning them, and all this learning having little to do with classes.
I had to learn how to have no parents but endure a flock of nuns seeming to pop up every time I turned around; I had to learn how to share with five girls in a dorm room instead of one sister in a bedroom; I had to learn how to hide my nightly letter to my boyfriend because my floor nun was suspect of that much correspondence to someone of the opposite sex by someone who needed to improve her study habits.
Because some girl paid her tuition in broccoli, I had to eat it for every meal but breakfast. I had to wear nylons every day and I couldn’t chew gum while I was walking.
It was all alien. So, by the time Thanksgiving came around, I was up at 5 a.m. to get showered and be first in line for the cab to the bus terminal. It was on that early morning that I saw my first nun in a bathrobe. Scary. But I was so happy I was getting out of there, I sailed past her as if I didn’t see her, as she was doing to me.
The ride home on the bus – Dubuque to Jefferson – took more than eight hours. It’s probably a five-hour drive, max, but there seemed to be no other way to get to Iowa’s western prairie. A covered wagon might have been faster.
But, rumbling into Jeff that evening, pulling up at the Lincoln hotel and seeing my friends awaiting me . . . ah, it is a moment I keep in the sweet-memories box.
My real friends, home from their colleges, were the same but more chic, more sophistique’. Jefferson was so beautiful. The buildings were grand and familiar. The dormant trees welcomed me with branches spread. My hometown had never looked so dear. Actually it had never looked dear at all; my whole life it had just been my hometown, no big deal.
But that night it was a big deal. I would have kissed the ground like an immigrant getting off the boat at Ellis Island if I could have done it without mortifying myself. I did not check my tears of gratefulness, however. I was right where I wanted to be at last, home, in Jefferson, most comfortable place in the universe.
The euphoria lasted all weekend, even toward Sunday at two when I had to board the eastbound. I knew I’d be back home in a month, so I was not bereft.
When I was asked to say Grace at the Thanksgiving meal, I was in a happy mood, surrounded by my dear fam, full of smells of roast turkey and stuffing. Even as I finished the prayer and my parents and grandparents looked at me in horror and my father said, “Is this what they teach you at that Catholic school?” Even as my older sister rolled her eyes and my younger sister laughed out loud; even as I blushed mightily, I was okay with my world because I was home. I could take a little heat, pretending that I was not in actuality thumbing my nose at a place that was chosen for me, not one that I had picked, and was therefore taking me a long while to adjust to.
The family got over it, but not that day, when we all bowed our heads, folded our hands, and the sweet little middle child said, “Rubba dub dub, thanks for the grub. Yaaaaay, God.”
