I love Des Moines. I can't stress that enough. I have fond memories of living there and I sometimes delude myself into thinking I could live there again, as an adult and parent. I can sort of see myself taking my kids to one of the schools that used to be praised as the best in the nation. I'd work downtown somewhere. Someday I'd go to highschool football games and root on my kids. (Thank goodness Dinah is talented athletically, because otherwise the kids would be doomed to being in choir, like I was. Though I enjoyed it and the mockery that came with it...but I digress). I suppose I can picture this because this is essentially what my parents did (you know, until the divorce).
And I was raised in a time when Des Moines, and Iowa in general, was losing many young people after college. This fact caused guidance counselors, parents and older people who stayed (usually at church for me) to oversell either the "good", "simple", "honest" life of Iowa, or the "hard", "dangerous", "expensive" life of anywhere else.* Sure it was unfair propaganda, but I was stupid. And I liked the dream of the easy life in Des Moines. Safe and honest.
But, as I said, it's a delusion.
I started to suspect I would leave Des Moines in highschool. I went to a magnet school half a day throughout highschool and it was here that I first really even thought that leaving Des Moines and looking for more was really a possibility. It wasn't so much that I had no idea that I could leave Des Moines, but more that I'd never really been asked to think about it. And at Central (the magnet school), I was suddenly surrounded by people who had not only given it thought, but who seemed to really have plans about where they were going and what they were doing. It's beside the point that they may not have ended up going where they thought they would, because it's highschool and no one really has it all figured out. The point is, these were people who had tried to figure it out. In contrast, I hadn't really given it much thought. I hadn't been encouraged to really.
I mean, yeah, I'd get asked what I wanted to be a lot. I did well in school and everyone at church seemed to think me a bright kid, so they wanted to know what thoughts I had about my future. Except, what they really wanted to do was tell me I should be a doctor or a lawyer. If I mentioned that I wanted to be a writer (which I did since the time of reading a Mark Twain biography after our trip to Hannibal, Mo.), it was generally ignored or discouraged. (I picked up on that quickly and started telling people that I wanted to be a circle. That answer never seemed satisfactory, so it somehow changed into "I want to be a duck. They can swim and fly and waddle. They got it all." Which I suppose was my way of saying, "I don't know. And I don't care for your ideas on my future." I was a jerk.) And as I got older and took those tests that tell you what you're "aptitudes" would lend themselves to, it seemed they always came up with things that I had no interest in. Civil Engineer. Lawyer. Good jobs, but niether are really things I wanted to be. When I had to talk about the results with the guidance counselors, I would smile and say, "sure, that sounds good" and "yeah, I guess that's gonna make me some cash." Whatever. I never took it seriously.
At Central, all of the sudden for me, expectations were raised. I remember my 9th grade civics teacher showing slides of his trip to Africa as part of a lesson and he said something that I'd never heard or thought before. "When you go to Africa..." When. It wasn't only a possibility, it was a foregone conclusion. I could go to Africa if I wanted. (Thailand will have to do for now.)
Suddenly, the delusion started to seem less certain to me. And as time went by, I became less and less enamored with Des Moines. There was nothing to do as a highschool student (not that there's much I do when I go back, either). And the people who seemed to want to stay always seemed like they were too content to try for anything better. Close friends from Lincoln (where I went to highschool the rest of time) stopped feeling as close as they were. And Lincoln itself, which I identified as being more "Iowan"--filled as it was with people who were probably going to stay in Iowa--never seemed to have a place for me. I was growing away from Iowa. Which ended up being the reason I ended up going to college right in the middle of it.
I wasn't sure about Grinnell the first time I visited. I remember the sun shining brightly on I80 as BD and I drove up for a visit. I had only applied to 2 schools, but I'd gotten into both of them. (In an odd moment of clarity and confidence, I had known going into the college process the type of school I had wanted and I hadn't really been too concerned about rejection.) One was in a quiet Missouri and the other was an hour from my house. And while rural Missouri wasn't exactly the whole world that I planned on seeing, it was somewhere new.**
Within 10 minutes of visiting Grinnell, though, I knew these would be my last 4 years in Iowa. I remember being on the tour. We were in Gates Pit, passing by a junior sitting in a tiny room studying chemistry (I think). The tour guide stopped and asked him why he was stuck in such a "shitty room". (He said shitty right in front of us. This was awesome.) The guy replied that he'd just gotten back from studying in....well, I can't remember where he'd studied. I want to say it was Africa, but it could've been China, or London, or Spain. The tourguide explained that Grinnell encouraged all of its students to go abroad. That's what put Grinnell in the lead to stay.
Of course the time at Grinnell is a whole other story.
*Once, after I'd moved to Chicago, I was back at church for the midnight service for Christmas, which our church held at 10 pm. (Seriously.) I was talking to a really nice lady who was 15 or so years older than I was about living in Chicago. Even though I'd been here for either 2 or 3 years (I can't remember which for sure) at that point, she had some advice for me. "If you go on the South Side, you better," (and she said the next part in a gutteral whisper and a thumb motion) "get the hell out. That's where the black people are." Yeah. She wasn't as nice as I thought.
**Not to mention that the college recruiter really wanted me to go there. She gave me special attention at the visit I attended, at one point telling me, "A cute guy like you should have no problem finding a girl to do your laundry and type up your papers for you." As a highschool senior I was seriously flattered. It only occurred to me later that it was sort of insulting to think I wouldn't/couldn't do those things for myself or that I expected/wanted someone to do those things for me. But I digress.
----
But, as I say, I love Des Moines. I love it for the opportunities it gave me, even if by giving me those opportunities, it made me realize Des Moines wasn't going to be the place I wanted it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment