by Su Meck
I had to talk to someone or I felt like I might burst, so I turned to my family and a few close friends. I had long conversations on the phone with my older brother, Rob. I told him on more than a few occasions: “Rob, I just want to push Jim down the stairs. . . . I want Jim to be in a horrible car accident. . . . I wish Jim would get bitten by a poisonous snake while he’s out mowing the lawn. . . .” Because Rob is super hilarious, he is one of the people in my family that was perfect to talk to when I felt obliged to say such preposterous things. And he understood my rage because he had dealt with troubles in his first marriage. At the same time, Rob is a calm, nonconfrontational kind of person, and although he was always great about listening to my quick-tempered rants, in the end he would usually say something like, “Su, I get it. But you need to take the high road.”
For whatever reason, those particular words stuck with me. I needed to take the high road. I had to be a much better person than Jim would ever have hope of being. I wanted to be able to rise above all of my outrage, hatred, and disgust. But how?
My parents were encouraging me to come and live with them for a time. They told me all about the Horizon Program, a course of study for returning, nontraditional students, at Hollins University, not far from where they live. I drove to Roanoke, and while there, Mom and Dad took me to visit the school. I talked to people at Hollins and had a tour of the beautiful campus. But I didn’t get any kind of “wow!” feeling visiting Hollins, and for whatever reason I just couldn’t see myself there at all.
My sister Diane also invited me to come and stay with her for a while, which tempted me and would have been tons of fun. When Diane and I get together we are just plain silly, laughing about anything and everything. Diane is also an easygoing, comfortable person to be around as well as being a terrific listener. Our phone calls during this time were epic, and they often could last up to three hours. Living with Diane might very well have lifted me out of my pit of rage and helped me to have a new lease on life.
But I couldn’t leave Kassidy during her senior year, and I certainly wasn’t about to uproot her! Plus, I was taking classes at Montgomery College and, given our precarious financial situation, I didn’t really want to just quit and lose all the money I had paid for not only the classes but also the books and supplies. It’s true that I wasn’t doing very well in those classes because I was, not surprisingly, pretty unfocused. I struggled more than ever with assigned readings, math homework, and essay writing. But there was a new fierce determination in my spirit that hadn’t been there before. I never forgot the extreme anger and contempt that I felt toward Jim. And it somehow fueled me to not give up on myself. Ever. Continuing with my path at Montgomery College became my high road.
22
Learning to Fly
—Tom Petty
Montgomery College saved my life. That probably sounds superdramatic, but it’s the truth. The people at Montgomery College saved me and gave me a life. Yes. That is probably a truer statement. All that, and they taught me how to love learning. And I guess how to learn how to learn—instead of just mimicking. When I was learning everything along with my kids as they went through school, I was mostly copying. Copying is not the same as learning. Not that I didn’t learn stuff from my kids by copying, but the “reason” piece was missing. The “why am I doing this?” part of learning was missing. At Montgomery College, I wasn’t allowed to just copy. I had to show every single step of how I got to the answer of an algebra problem. I had to write an essay explaining why there were advantages in looking at the world through a sociological lens. I had to give an oral presentation about Susan Graham and explain what the incredible mezzo-soprano contributed to the world of opera. I had to think about and come up with ideas on my own.
It may sound crazy, but I had never really done that before. Sure, I had made decisions about whether Patrick was sick enough to stay home from school, or what party games we could play at Kassidy’s tenth birthday, or whether Benjamin needed new shoes before starting school. I could certainly learn from the decisions I made. For example, Patrick probably should not have gone to school that time he had a temperature of 103 (true story). I learned to take the kids’ temperatures and not just see what they looked like before sending them out the door to the bus. And learning from one’s mistakes is a good way to learn. Lord knows that I learned most of what I know from first making (occasionally disastrous) mistakes. But making those kinds of decisions and mistakes is not the same thing as learning new things.
I learned a lot over the years by simply observing what other people did and what other people said, and then doing or saying it myself. But once again, observing somebody doing something or saying something and then doing it or saying it yourself is not exactly the same as learning something. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I still didn’t understand why I did half the stuff I did. I just knew that it was the right thing to do. I didn’t understand why I went to church. But I knew it was the right thing to do in my family. I didn’t know why the kids had to do math packets every summer. But I knew that they had them and they had to be completed by the first day of school. I didn’t know why I had to make four thousand Christmas cookies every year. But I knew if I didn’t, my family and the neighbors would ask me why I hadn’t made Christmas cookies and I would not have an answer.
But I digress.
The learning I was able to figure out how to do at Montgomery College had everything to do with me. Not in a gross, selfish way, but in a this-professor-is-here-teaching-his-class-today-and-I-am-a-student-here-to-learn way. And that was new. I was the student who was sitting in that class. I was writing down things in my notebook that I thought were important. Nobody was telling me exactly what to write down. If I wanted something clarified, I had to speak up and ask the professor a question. If I didn’t ask, I might never know the answer. I couldn’t depend on other people in the class to have the exact same questions I had. This may all sound very trivial and basic, but to me it was huge! I was not only learning subject content, whether it be algebra, music history, sociology, or environmental biology, I was also learning to speak up for myself. Nobody was at college with me, talking for me, answering for me, studying for me, writing for me, doing for me. I did stuff by myself. And I learned I was pretty darn good at this whole learning business. Once I started learning, I just wanted to know more, and more, and more.
But the next fall, Jim said that there was no money for me to continue with school. (Of course there wasn’t.) My parents (again) stepped in and agreed to pay for my education, including all my books, until I graduated from Montgomery College. After that, I was even more determined to do well so as not to disappoint my parents. I still wasn’t quite doing it for myself.
Tests made me nervous because I was always worried I wouldn’t be able to read or write somehow on the day one was given. Writing papers made me nervous because I still felt like such an amateur when writing them, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. Everyone just assumed that I knew how to research a topic. I didn’t. Kassidy held my hand and walked me baby step by baby step through those first few papers. I learned about the Writing, Reading, and Language Center in the basement of the library right before I graduated. Oh, well.
The professors at Montgomery College were there because they loved to teach. Most of my classes there were smallish, no more than twenty or thirty students, some much smaller, and the professors knew the names of their students just a week or two into each semester. The professors were happy to help in whatever way they could. They wanted students to be successful. I don’t know why, but I was continually amazed by that fact. Sharon Ward was my environmental biology professor my very last semester before graduating. There was one unit where we had to know how to balance simple equations. I had no idea what that meant or how to do it. Kassidy had enrolled at Barnard College in New York City at this point, so I couldn’t ask her for help. I went and talked to Professor Ward and explained that I had never done any of t
his equation-balancing business before. She sat with me in her office for nearly an hour right then and there and taught me how to balance equations. Professor Bill Coe was my teacher for both pre-algebra and Algebra I. He could probably teach math to a rock, I’m not kidding, and he spent so much extra time with me trying to explain in varied and differing ways how to factor equations. Professor Coe figured out that my basic issue with factoring was that I did not yet know all my multiplication tables automatically. These are just two of the many examples of Montgomery College professors going above and beyond any typical teaching duties, and I will always be eternally grateful for all of the time they gave to me.
But one of the most important things I learned from my professors at Montgomery College was to be honest about who I was and what I had been through. I met Professor Sue Adler at the Awards Assembly for Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for two-year colleges, in the spring of 2008. She mentioned during that assembly that she was the faculty adviser for Phi Theta Kappa, and that students would have the opportunity to interview with her if they were interested in becoming Phi Theta Kappa officers for the 2008–2009 school year. Since I was newly inducted into Phi Theta Kappa, I was feeling smart and courageous. I knew those feelings wouldn’t last long, so I spoke to Sue during the reception following the assembly, thinking that she would ask me to make an appointment with her. Instead, she said, “Great! Write down your name, phone number and e-mail for me and I’ll contact you as to when our first planning meeting will be during the summer.” I guess I was in. That was certainly easy. I loved being part of the Phi Theta Kappa board, and I grew to love Sue Adler and the other faculty adviser, Brian Baick. Sue is one of those people who only surround themselves with other practical and hardworking people. She knows everything about Montgomery College and everyone who has anything to do with the school. She and her husband, Bill, a retired MC professor, are both full of energy and positivity.
It was during my time as an officer for the honor society that I began to open up about the story of my head injury and my journey back to school. Marianne, the group’s president that year, wanted all of us to show up at the first planning meeting of second semester with a bag of objects that meant something to us personally, in order to promote a kind of bonding or team spirit among all of us officers. One of the objects in my bag was the Dr. Seuss book Hop on Pop. I explained to everyone that the book was the first one I had ever read, and that I was twenty-two years old when I read it. I had never spoken to anyone other than my family and very close friends about any of this, so I have no idea what exactly prompted me to tell these fellow students and advisers the tale. Each person in that room was shocked, and when I finished speaking, everyone just stared at me. I was embarrassed and immediately regretted my decision about saying anything. But I had read their reactions incorrectly. It wasn’t “Wow! She’s odd.” Or, “You poor thing.” Or, “Get out of here, you weirdo!” It wasn’t any of those things. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it wasn’t anything critical. And after that, I felt a little less afraid, having gotten it off my chest.
Soon I was telling more and more people my story. After that meeting, Sue talked to Gus Griffin, one of the psychology professors and counselors at MC who specialized in memory. Gus wanted me to come and speak to his class about my injury and my life since. I said yes, simply because I couldn’t say no to professors, especially Sue. But I had no idea what I could possibly say to his students. About the same time, Kassidy was enrolled in a first-year seminar class at Barnard College all about memory. She told her professor, Alexandra Horowitz, about me, and Dr. Horowitz asked if I would be willing to come to Barnard and speak to her class as well. Again, I said yes. Again, I hadn’t a clue what I would talk about.
I hesitantly approached Jim and told him that I had been asked to speak both at Montgomery College and Barnard about my head injury. I asked if he would be willing to talk to me in greater detail about what happened the day of my accident, my hospital stay, the time when I was first back home—anything, really, that I could possibly turn into some semblance of a speech or presentation. Those first conversations we had were the beginnings of what would become the great awareness and appreciation between Jim and me. It became clear at first that Jim didn’t have all the facts quite right. For some reason, he thought that my injury happened in the winter of 1988, right after the holidays. And he thought I had been in the hospital for eight weeks instead of just three. But those details were minor compared to everything I did learn from him. And all the things he learned from me, too. I ended up speaking to Gus’s classes every semester my last two years at Montgomery College. I traveled to Barnard twice to give talks to Dr. Horowitz’s first-year seminar. I spoke at my dad’s Kiwanis Club in Roanoke, Virginia, and was asked to speak at a meeting of business leaders in Montgomery County in the spring of 2011.
Sue Adler told me about the Paul Peck Humanities Institute scholarship program in the spring of 2010. There were opportunities for students at Montgomery College to intern for a semester at the Smithsonian, the Holocaust Museum, and the Library of Congress. The application process was grueling, but Jim helped me to write out a résumé, and assisted with endless essay revisions. I heard in August that I had been accepted to intern that fall in the music division at the Library of Congress. I could not have been more surprised, excited, and nervous all at the same time.
I started that great adventure right after Labor Day by riding on the MARC train to Union Station in Washington, D.C. (by myself), and then walking the few blocks to the Library of Congress’s Madison Building (by myself), which housed the music division. I never got tired of that walk and was always amazed by people who just rushed by the Capitol building, the judicial buildings, and any number of other important government agencies, hunched over their cell phones with their heads down. Uncivil politics aside, Washington, D.C., is an important city, full of significant history. Prominent people have lived and worked there making influential decisions for hundreds of years, and I was awestruck each and every day.
My assignment at the Library of Congress that fall was to help organize and digitally catalog thousands of pieces of Civil War sheet music so they could be seen, accessed, and utilized by anyone in the world. The 150th anniversary of the Civil War was just around the corner, and this sheet-music project was to be part of a larger Civil War exhibition. My direct supervisor at the library was Mary Wedgewood. I was a little afraid of her at first because my typing and computer skills were less than adequate for such a task as this. I felt her frustration with me, and that made me nervous. But as time passed I grew to really love and respect her. (And my skills improved a bit, too). Mary encouraged me to go to the many varied noontime talks that were offered to library staff, everyone from authors, to historians, to scientists, to performing artists, to international celebrities. She invited me to meetings, took me to underground stacks, introduced me to lots of people, and got me involved in the annual Book Festival held on the National Mall. Mary genuinely wanted me to understand that the music division and my single project in that division was just one small part of the history and mission of the library. My experiences that semester were extraordinary.
As graduation from Montgomery Collge approached, I began thinking, What’s next? Sue Adler had invited me to roundtable talks with admissions officers from Mount Holyoke College and Smith College. Both schools were small, elite women’s colleges in western Massachusetts that had first-rate programs for nontraditional students. Both schools were highly competitive, with rigorous application procedures, but Sue thought I was up to the task. She always had more confidence in me than I ever had in myself. I was accepted to Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Columbia University. It was a tremendously difficult decision, but in the end, Smith felt like the right choice.
I received a phone call from Beth Homan, from the Office of Advancement and Community Engagement at Montgomery College, a week or so before graduation asking if I would be willin
g to talk to a reporter from the Washington Post. Every year, Montgomery College picked a few human-interest stories to pitch to the news media at graduation time. Daniel de Visé came to our house on a Friday. My parents and all three kids were there for the weekend to help celebrate my upcoming graduation, and thank goodness they were. I don’t think I said two words to Dan the whole time he was there because I was so scared about saying something stupid. Jim and Benjamin did most of the talking, filling him in on the injury and my long journey back to school. Matt McClain snapped photos for the forthcoming Post article, and let me know that he would meet me the following morning at the college to take more pictures of me on my big day.
Graduation itself was a blur of constant adrenaline. Everything from putting on my cap and gown, to lining up and walking to a huge tent with my fellow graduates, to speeches and receiving my diploma, to pictures, hugs, and congratulations. I can’t remember a happier day.
Left to right: Dad, me, Benjamin, Mom, Kassidy, and Patrick at my graduation from Montgomery College, May 2011
