The Other Road

Posted on September 16, 2003 in Book of Days College Sorrow & Regret

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about something you would do differently.

I majored in Anthropology. I have a difficult time explaining how this came to be. My parents opposed my preferred major which was English. They’d read the story of starving literature majors who could not find a job, I suppose, and my brother, who was a loud and dominant voice when it came to my future had taken a few literature courses at UC Riverside where they caught on to his fraud, I guess, and gave him Bs and less. I loved literature: I got As in high school and scored a 5 on the AP literature examination. Writing was what I did well. But my mother subscribed to the belief that you had to become strong in what you were weak in. My father believed that I wasn’t good in math because he was a programmer and a cost analyst, that I didn’t like math because he did. My brother, I think, encouraged the idea because he was better at math that I was and often advised my parents on what my future should be.

I settled on anthropology in part because it wasn’t business or economics. (When I got a C in economics because the teacher was a flaming — and I mean flaming — Laffer Curve Luddite who wanted to turn everything over to private industry, my father thought again it was getting back at him. There wasn’t that much math in economics. The guy preached ideas that revolted me. For example: everything has a substitute. A student raised his head. “What’s the substitute for food?” “Starvation,” said the John Birch Society-approved Claremont Men’s College professor. My father, the scion and champion of trade unions and New Deal politics, should have been proud.) I loved mythology as I still do now. Anthopology seemed to offer me a way to do my literature thing on the sly.

My brother, who majored in sociology and economics, championed the idea. I guess he figured that he wanted me to be another clone of himself or else he knew it was going to be a road to failure. He spent his college career playing games at UC Santa Barbara — they called them “simulations”. My father relented when an old dream of his own welled up: I could become an archaeologist and “dig pots” for a living. My mother went along.

Knuckling under to their pressure not to follow the field I loved was the single worst decision I ever made in my life. I became enmeshed in faculty politics. I pretended to be interested in ideas that bored me. I even got a fellowship at Duke University in the field (which irritated my brother to no end because he had not been good enough for graduate) and flunked out after a year for reasons too diverse to go into here.

If I could go back, I’d find a way to major in literature. I would work hard, focus on the thing that mattered to me. If my parents refused to pay, I would find a way. I would starve to buy books. I would write and write. I would forget about being a perfect little clone of mass society. I would become what I had wanted to be.

Twenty five years after the fact, I am striving towards this dream. I don’t talk to my brother. My mother accepts that I must do this. My father died a month before my 22nd birthday.

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• Joker on the Run
  
• Prairie Point
  
• Shameless Agitator

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a purchase.