Boy Story: The Road Taken - 2. My Situation

My Situation

The year was 1997, my sophomore year of college, and I was living on campus in a dorm. I had purposely selected to live in a low-rise building because the high-rise towers had a reputation for round-the-clock partying. Of course, that wasn’t 100% true, but that was the perception. The low-rise dorm I lived in had its share of partying, but at least it was confined to weekends, so we could actually get schoolwork done during the week. The towers were more crowded with less privacy and more distractions. The last thing I needed was temptation and more distractions to impact my school work.

My roommate since freshman year was Joe. I didn’t know him before college, but from the moment we met, we were like best friends. He was a bit of an extrovert and I was not so much, so having him around seemed to help me socially. He always knew where the best weekend parties were, and I usually got an invite. Consequently, he spent a lot of time visiting his friends in the towers, and if I was around, I was often along for the ride.

Joe was from a fairly wealthy family with a successful family business in home heating oil distribution, so he didn’t need to do well in college, just graduate and he’d have a good-paying job waiting for him when he was done. He also had a credit card paid for by his family to cover his expenses while at school.

My situation was much different. My family was upper middle class but still had to scrape the money together to send me to college. If I screwed around and didn’t get good grades, my Dad would pull the plug on that failed experiment. When my parents replaced their Oldsmobile Cutlass with a new car, they gave me the Olds for college. Since it was 9 years old, it had the right name on it “Olds,” but it ran. As anyone knows, owning a car is not cheap, so I had to work during my college days to keep it on the road. That’s just how it was.

I got a part-time job freshman year as a stock person at a discount clothing box store in one of the many malls in town. It was the anchor store in a smaller-sized indoor mall. Although the store wasn’t far from campus, it was too far to walk, so I always drove there and back. I only worked three nights a week, but it kept fuel in the car (it had a V8 engine), and I had a few bucks left over.

During the summer, I lived back home with my parents. The store had no problem getting summer help when the local high schoolers were lined up looking for a summer job, so it wasn't as important for me to work there in summer. The store manager didn’t mind my leaving as long as I agreed to come back in October for the holiday season into spring. Since I was already trained, I became an asset during the busy season.

My family lived roughly an hour and a half away from the college—much too far for a daily school commute, but not bad if I had to return home for a family function. It was the best of both worlds—far enough, but not too far. My family would go on a two-week vacation most every summer, which we usually took in conjunction with other family members, such as cousins, aunts, and uncles. Those vacations would usually become the high point of my year, and they were always something to look forward to.

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