During this adult lifetime I’ve moved more than fifteen times, and though I have a marked tendency to collect and hoard, much has been lost through the years.
When I lived in Portland I had a house filled to capacity with clothes, toys, art, and ephemera. When I moved to Seattle I shed half of the clutter. When I moved to England the remaining material possessions had to fit in a twenty foot container box. When that lot arrived in customs fully half of the items were damaged beyond repair: a liberating tragedy.
Of all that has been sold, discarded, or lost I can honestly say I do not miss much. The taxidermy and record collections live on in my old house, and I can visit whenever I like. There are a few dresses I remember fondly, but I would never wear them again even if they were hanging in my cupboard.
The single exception, the only object I miss, is a white plastic cup with a green lid, purchased during my first week of college and used every day all the way through graduate school. In the genre of travel mugs it would not rate very high as it was not insulated, but this was a feature I appreciated because the scorching hot coffee or tea kept my hands warm as I scrambled around campus. By the time it cooled completely it was time for a refill, a ritual repeated endlessly through the years – stretching far beyond just my education.
The cup went with me everywhere, and though the printed logo on the side vanished after a few vigorous scrubs, the cup was distinctive to a certain portion of the general public. In the Northwest hardly anyone commented, but in places as disparate as NYC or Tucson it was entirely ordinary to be standing around, cup in hand, and have a stranger pop out of a crowd to ask Did you go to Evergreen?
Oh, indeed. Wherever else? There are many valid criticisms of the school, and I was either miserable or furious throughout much of the experience, but there is literally no other campus where I could have survived – let alone thrived.
When asked for advice on college selection, I restrict myself to the observation that freaky kids should go to freaky schools. Though I do write letters of reference if people simply insist on Brown or Columbia, I tend to think that most of my friends and family members are well advised to choose an experiential, collaborative, interdisciplinary institution. Without grades or defined curriculum. Where you can fail or succeed on your own terms – without interference.
The reason is simple: we are all without exception the sort who confront the world with a You’re not the boss of me attitude.
Evergreen does not require that you select a mentor but having an advocate makes it easier to navigate the place. At first I had serious problems with professors and advising staff who told me to forfeit my scholarships, give up and go home. Tired of this attitude, I finally marched up to the director of the Native American Studies program and said I’m nineteen years old and the first person in my family to go to college. I have a four week old baby, a rare genetic disorder, two different kinds of cancer, and a possibly terminal auto-immune disease. I want to be here. What can you do to help?
He replied Anything you need.
That was the start of a benevolent friendship I am still trying to understand years after his unexpected early death. He was a Blake scholar, a poet, a fan of baseball – and hugely controversial. His personal and professional life were rife with scandal that shocked even the most tolerant.
He also signed every single independent study contract I devised, letting me combine literature with health education, writing with stints teaching sex ed in juvenile prisons, and collaborations with James. I enjoyed perfect freedom and only talked to my professor once every quarter, when we decided how to assign credits given my goal of public policy graduate school.
This was, he advised, a mistake. He said that reading my fiction was like walking barefoot across broken glass. He said You are a writer – but I didn’t care. I was too busy.
I was one of the most vocal critics of institutional failings, but Evergreen has the perfect answer for internal complaints: internal governance. I didn’t just stomp around declaiming, I was appointed to a task force. I didn’t just agitate for my own benefit, I ran the union of students with disabilities. All of my work study paychecks were funneled through these activities. Eventually, I wrote the first ADA compliance policy ratified by the deans.
I was no fan of Olympia, was never involved in the culture of the town or school; although many of my current friends were around at the time, I did not socialize with them. I had a child, and a goal: to acquire practical credentials and a steady job with benefits. Parties, shows, band practices? Frivolity! I rushed through my undergrad in two and a half years, and chose to stay on for graduate school because I was offered high quality subsidized child care on campus. Someone else might remember – how much did we pay each month? One hundred dollars, maybe two?
Staff members in childcare center were kind, devoted, and best of all, state employees making a decent wage with full benefits. Several became friends; the director and one teacher remained in touch for a decade after I moved away.
Given that my rent was never more than a hundred dollars a month, this meant that I could scrounge by without taking out major loans. Living on a graduate assistantship is in fact difficult, but we had The Corner! Bless the hippies, for they shall provide cheap garlicky grub, and let you wash dishes to pay if need be. Just bring your own fork.
I was the youngest person ever admitted to the public administration graduate program and pursued my studies with a ferocity still remembered by the faculty. They did not know what to make of me; how do you seminar on organizational theory if you’ve never had a real job? They compensated by putting me on the faculty hiring committee.
My fellow students were all ten or twenty years older and they treated me like a pet, took me out for my first legal drink, elected me to run the student association – a thankless task but of course, exactly my sort of treat.
I’ve never been infatuated with a person, but in those years I had an intellectual love affair with the Grange movement. Research ruled my life, and I loved it. The passive neglect of my advisor was probably intended to force me out of the program, but I didn’t want supervision – I wanted to save the world. This translated to a job staffing a project through the Governor’s office (trivia: the one ousted for sexual harassment – and no, he never tried it on with me).
That in turn determined my thesis, one of the very few in the history of the program with a single author – we weren’t allowed, but when have I ever followed that kind of rule? It was predicted that I would fail but despite great personal chaos (cancer tests, clandestine dates, testifying in multi-million dollar lawsuits, a messy and protracted divorce, typing the final document through the night in the computer lab as my toddler slept under the desk, you know – the usual) I finished all course work and writing on time. Unlike two-thirds of my cohort group.
The director of the program strongly advised against my thesis: I used a participatory research methodology to analyze the implementation of a federal civil rights law at the state and local level. When I presented the final product she shook her head and laughed and said that it should be published.
Of course, that never happened. I resolutely went forward into the world, taking up a government job that seemed ideal, staffing disability policy advisory boards. Then I quit. Forever. Citing nothing more than the fact that I did not like wearing beige clothing. This outcome was probably obvious – how could a person too contrary for an alternative liberal arts college survive in government service?
I carried my Evergreen cup around for about ten years before it was mislaid, and every time I took a sip I was reminded of the lessons from that period of my life. I miss it. That cup kept my fingers warm.