Memoir: Part II of the college years

Since her freshman year had begun in September, the Christmas holiday was the first time that Kathryn had returned to her parents' home in Delaware. Most of the other students went home to nearby towns every weekend because Middle Tennessee State University was a suitcase college. Occasionally, Kathryn went home with a friend on the weekend and enjoyed a home-cooked meal, but more often she stayed on campus in a mostly empty dorm on a mostly empty campus.

(Her only sibling, an older sister Lynda had begun college at the University of Kentucky four years earlier in 1963. On the day that Kathryn and their parents had taken Lynda to her dorm on the Lexington campus, the fourteen-year-old Kathryn went to hug her sister good-bye, and Lynda pushed her roughly away. Stunned and deeply hurt, Kathryn had been confused by her action. Even though there was usually little affection between them, there had been nothing to signal such overt rejection.

After Kathryn had gone to college in 1967, Lynda moved back in with their parents in Delaware with her two-year-old daughter. Depressed, she was going through a divorce that she didn't want.

Though Kathryn didn't know why, she and Lynda had never been close sisters. They were almost four years apart in age and in school, but decades apart in knowing and loving one another. Perhaps that was part of the reason Kathryn had been so affected by the sorority sisters' rejecting her.)

But now back to the present, Christmas 1967. Living so far away from her home, Kathryn had not seen her parents since September. Because the MTSU dorms were closed for the holidays, Kathryn flew to Delaware for the Christmas break between semesters. Kathryn did not consider Delaware her home. Her parents had moved there with her father's job after Kathryn had graduated from high school in North Carolina.

In contrast to what one might expect during the Christmas holidays, the mood around her home was tense and gloomy. In one of his depressed bi-polar states, her father mostly sat in his Lazyboy chair, falling sleep in front of the TV. Her mother seemed unusually nervous and tired. The Christmas tree was up but not decorated, and Kathryn's mother asked her to decorate it. She discovered it was no fun to decorate a tree by herself. But still Kathryn kept trying to make things happy for the holidays by playing Christmas music and passing around the eggnog.

On Christmas afternoon, Kathryn, Lynda, their mother, and two-year-old Shelley were in the green and yellow kitchen, preparing a traditional Christmas dinner. Since early morning, the fragrance of roasting turkey wafted through the house from the avocado green oven. The voice of Johnny Mathis singing “Jingle Bells”and other Christmas carols floated into the kitchen from the stereo in the formal living room, where stood the decorated tree all lit up with opened presents still underneath.

In the adjacent dining room, the dark mahogany dining room table with the ladder back chairs around it was all set with her mother's best Desert Rose china, the highly polished Candlelight silverware, and cloth napkins. Excited by all of the unusual activities, little Shelley was dancing around the kitchen.

Kathryn sat at the maple kitchen table, peeling oranges for the ambrosia, wondering if she was getting enough of the white part off when suddenly out of nowhere, Lynda told her two-year-old daughter Shelley to tell Aunt Kathryn that she hated her. And of course, not even knowing what she was saying, the little girl began loudly to parrot her mother's voice, “I hate you, Aunt Kathryn! I hate you, Aunt Kathryn!”

Even then, Kathryn knew that these were Lynda's words, not the child's. Uncharacteristically, Kathryn physically lit into her sister and began to strike her, yelling, “Tell her to stop! Tell her to stop!” What she really wanted to say to Lynda was “Stop it—stop rejecting me. Stop hurting me. Stop hating me.”

Kathryn honestly didn't remember the rest of the holiday, but she was so affected by the incident that back at college for the spring semester, she suffered from extreme worry and severe insomnia. Night after ruthless night, she lay awake thinking about her family. But keeping the family rule about “always looking good in front of others,”she didn't confide in any of her friends.

Adding to her family troubles or perhaps because of them, she felt overwhelmed by her school work that semester. Her grades began to plummet. In a called-conference, her Western Civilization II professor, Dr. Crawford, known as one of the toughest professors on campus, questioned her in his rather condescending voice, “Why aren't you doing better on my tests?”Apparently, as he told her, English majors usually did well on his essay tests. Vowing to study harder, she cringed at his remarks and blamed herself.

Then things got worse. Her Modern Poetry class was taught by the wife of the English Department chairman, the formidable Dr. Virgina Peck. Besides undergraduates, the rather small class also included graduate students in English. Kathryn felt intimidated by the subject matter, the professor, and the other students. With little confidence in her own intellect, in desperation one late night while explicating a modern poem, she copied too many words from a library book without giving her source directly after each paragraph.

At the next class, Dr. Peck said to Kathryn, “See me in my office.” With her heart in her throat, she found her way to the office and entered into a world of academia: built in book shelves piled high to the ceiling with old and new leather books of all colors and a huge old oak desk with piles of student essays neatly stacked on top. Dr. Peck leaned back in her swivel chair and told Kathryn to have a seat.

Then she slowly pulled out a book from her desk drawer, one that Kathryn recognized immediately as the library book that she had used to explicate that poem. Kathryn's eyes opened wide, and she could feel the heat as her neck and face flushed.

Dr. Peck asked, “Do you know what plagiarism is?”

Kathryn stammered, “Not exactly. I'm sorry. I didn't know. It was late, and I was so tired. Did I not footnote enough to tell you where I had gotten the information?”

Ignoring her question, the professor threatened, “Plagiarism is stealing, and you have stolen someone else's words and ideas and passed them off as your own. For such an offense, I can have you expelled from the English program and possibly even from the college”

Humiliation and shame clung to her like a dense fog as Kathryn made her way to the nearest restroom to cry in a dark stall. She told no one about the incident.

There was one person whom Kathryn felt that she could trust enough to confide in about her home life—a kindly psychology professor, Mr. White. When she told him her story about the Christmas incident, he told her the most freeing thing, “You don't have to go home for the summer. It's not written in stone that you have to go back to that environment.”

So began her journey away from her family--to independence and self-reliance.

When Kathryn told her parents that she wasn't coming home that summer, they almost seemed relieved. They didn't try to convince her otherwise; they didn't say “Are you sure?” or “We are sorry,” or “We shall miss you.” Since they had some business to take care of in Cincinnati concerning Lynda's divorce, they drove down and helped Kathryn settle into Nashville's downtown YWCA.

And there they left her at eighteen years of age to completely fend for herself. A summer which she would recall in vivid detail—a summer of growing up.

to be continued . . .