Goal

 

You know I broke a heart tonight

Aren't you proud of me?

My mind told me he wasn't right

My heart just didn't agree

But I control my mind

And my mind controls my soul

I'm doing what I ought to do

I'm headed for some distant goal

Where's that distant goal?

Oh so distant goal . . .

* * *

My senior year in high school was very different from all my other school years. Most notably, I was in the throes of my first major depressive episode -- though I didn't recognize that until years later. (I had one friend who did, though. Bless you, Jean.) I had quit cheerleading, broken up with my boyfriend, and generally dropped out of social life altogether. The other major factor was the war I had with my mother the previous year about college. She did not want me to go to college, and did everything she could to prevent it from happening. That's a long long saga which I won't recount here. The end result was that I was accepted at Harding College -- a Church of Christ school in Arkansas. I was living in Michigan, where I was born and raised, and had never lived in the South. But all the relatives on my mother's side of the family had migrated from Arkansas to Michigan. So I was not entirely a Yankee -- people often asked me "Where are you from originally?" 

Another pertinent aspect of my senior year was that our overcrowded school had resorted to "split sessions" in which the high school had classes from 7am to noon, and the junior high from 12:30 to 5:30 in the afternoon. That winter the sun didn't rise until my second class period, and when my younger brother got out of school at 5:30 it was already beginning to get dark. (Meanwhile, my youngest brother and my parents were on regular daytime schedules.) One of the symptoms of depression, for me, is feeling cold all the time. A chill that seemed to come from inside my body ("as if my bones were made of ice" is how I described it). I just could not get warm enough. I have never been a morning person, to begin with. But that year it was especially difficult for me to get up and around in time for school. The routine I developed was a rather drastic coping mechanism. I would get out of bed extra early, before anyone else was awake. And I would go into the bathroom to get ready. We had a big old-fashioned clawfoot cast iron bathtub, which I would fill with hot water, as hot as I could get it. It took several minutes for me to gradually ease  my way from standing to a sitting position. And then I would just soak, trying to get warm enough to face the day. Another part of my routine was to tune the radio to a Memphis station, which I could only do in the wee hours, before the local stations' signals cluttered up the airwaves. Since I knew my future was taking me to the South, I was trying to mentally prepare for the transition to a different culture. I spent that last year of high school re-imagining my whole future, and re-inventing my self-image to coincide with it. 

 

PHOTO: High school graduation. I was class president so I had to make a speech.

PHOTO: Me with my grandparents in Bald Knob, Arkansas, 1972. 

(They lived just a few miles from Harding College and were a large part of why I ended up being able to go to school there.)

* * *

In hindsight, I'd have to say that my life has pretty much followed the path I envisioned while steeping in that bathtub all those cold dark mornings. I graduated from Harding, and I've lived in the South ever since then -- 54 years now. I guess I did reach "that distant goal", after all.