Personal Narrative: My Trip To A Community College

After leaving my high school life behind me, I looked for a way to escape my dreary surroundings. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and even if I had, I had no plan to achieve them. I spent my last year trying to enjoy my time and desiring that other people invited me to be in their company that I had no plan for when that last school bell rang. When it finally rang out, I was again lost. The only difference was that I no longer had classes. Going to Rock Valley rectified that. Like other kids going to a community college, I had no direction in my classes and was without an idea about what a degree would get me.
I made trips to Minnesota, using any reason to move to the only place I felt at ease. I needed to find what I did not
have and I believed that I was living in a new place, life would be better. No matter how bad things were, I could not let others know. Having no plans for my future and wanderlust was a definite bad combination. However, it kept me moving when nothing else would. I needed something to keep me excited and imagining something better wherever I was not fit the bill for me.
When the Searing Center closed, I moved in with two other displaced residents, because we all had money from the management company for having broken our leases. My first stop was living in a trailer with a fellow runaway from reality who was also a neurotic with bizarre idiosyncrasies. In time, I sublet rooms in basements, subdivided houses all around town, while working just enough to pay my bills, or used public assistance, when I was eligible. As long as I could get by, it was all good.
However, it was not always good. Yet, I was not about to let my parents know I was failing, not in school, but now in life. It meant that I was integrated with food pantries and shelters. In the winter when I was at the Searing Center, I used the window ledge of my room to store food needing to be refrigerated; as I was in central Minnesota. A shelter in Mankato that used to be as an old church was where I was when I met a man who claimed to be a cat burglar. I did not see being without an address as limiting. I did not recognize anything I was being denied.
While staying at this shelter, I was working for the seasonal corn pack for Green Giant. It would be one of three summers where I worked the corn pack. I would listen to the radio at a certain time for the loud work whistle and the sound of the “Jolly Green Giant” and his “Ho, Ho, Ho, Green Giant” call sign for the notice if my 12-hour first shift was working. The hours were grueling, there was a lunatic two room down from me, and nothing felt free for me.
As I already noted, reality slapped me in the face as I ate a day-old roll with one dangerous man. While I did have money, enough to find some other place to continue my subsistence life in Mankato, I called home where my father sent me a bus ticket home. I would have found that other place to stay, however, that man who had told me that if he had become inspired, he would find me and kill me. While he was dominating and intimidating, he was not a bully. He might have been a sociopath and was clearly out of his mind. His conversation motivated me to leave Minnesota.
In Lacrosse, Wisconsin shelter, I spent a few days there.
While I cannot pinpoint an exact day when I was staying at the shelter in Mankato, I do have at least one day when I was at this shelter. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up that day. While the event was the talk and attention of most of the country, as a resident of a homeless shelter, it absorbed only five minutes of a day. It was a point of reference. As sad as that tragedy was, I had no idea where my next meal was to think about a group of astronauts and a teacher dying in Florida. That is the thing about life; in that we live it in a rather myopic way. We tend to live it by what is directly in front of
us.
In the back of my mind, I always knew that before living in a cardboard box, I could call my parents. Some of the people I interacted with at times were living on the street. While always finding some place to stay, there were days that I was happy with one meal. While these periods were short lived, they were what drove the back to Illinois and my parents’ home. There were just three times when I truly did not have a home, if after I had to leave that shelter, if I did not have the money to rent a room, my parents would find a way to take me back.
There are people who have lived with abuse, personal demons or addictions that did not or do have such a safety valve. Some of the people on the street whom I recognized as also running away from some type of pain had no respite. They had fallen through the basement of their life, with no one to give them a ticket to safety. In this, I was a lucky man, even if I was not aware of it at the time. One of the two men that I rented a trailer with after Searing Center closing, intermittently spent time renting a place and being homeless. He did not have a net, nor did he recognize a world that had them. Part of what made him neurotic was the fact that he had lived on the streets enough he sometimes talked to himself.
As the number of people who are bullied, who have no safety nets, are also people who have fallen through that basement. Some of whom become one of the nameless people you see on the sidewalks. For many, neither their parents nor the childhood home is a haven. They either are the root of their torment, or contribute to it. It is another call to arms for each of us who see others being dominated or diminished by others, to stand up and be the people we always thought that we could become. For this reason, there is no better time to be a champion for someone else than today.
We see people walking the street, carrying pain in their faces for anyone who would truly see them, not just observe their passing. It is more than saying “but for the grace of God…” in going through the motions of our day. They are brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. These were once optimistic and curious and kids with a future until someone or some misfortune stole it from them. We can always say that we are blessed not to face what such people confront. We need to put the face of the person we most dearly love to the needy person in front of us. Are we willing to walk past them then? If not, be the brother, sister, mother or father, they do not have.
Whatever the abuse they survived had changed them and took away their ability to connect with our “normal” society, it meant provoking pain they could not reconcile on their own.
Their dreams were pulled away when one person decided to dominate them. Our society, be it ordinary or fractured, everyone lives in a community where no one is alone. In that context, anyone who is abused will be seen or there will always be some around to notice signs of their abuse. The people that we walk around during our day, many are those who could have helped and yet we have chosen not to help them.
For me, I was a neurotic young man, walking around town. Instead of having a list my favorite restaurants, I kept a note of the water fountains in the downtown. I could not afford the city bus, so I walked everywhere. From Madson’s Grocery store to the downtown Mall to the hotel and the town’s only strip club, there were businesses and offices where people of means would pass me in the street. Yet, I was invisible in a way that was clear to me that they did not want to know that I was there. Whether working, eating at a café, sitting at a bus stop, there were people who deliberately looked away as to not see
me.
As I sat in this converted church, a crazy man who told me wild stories as I ate a day-old roll to scare me enough for me to contact my father who sent me a bus ticket to take me back home to Illinois. On the streets, I was a tourist as my safety net was always there. This was a net my former roommate never had. It was one that many who are living on the streets today only dream of having. However, four years after high school, I still did not have a plan, but as I had a direction as I recognized that I needed to find a purpose.