Chapter 43

College changed my life. And me. Nobody teased me about my name. If anyone mentioned it, they thought it was fun or cute! I didn’t get teased for using words longer than two syllables. I didn’t get razzed about knowing the answers to questions from teachers.  Made the dean’s list a number of times. Made lots of new friends.

I lost much of my shyness and, in Mother’s words, I “blossomed.” I worked in the library for two years, was a resident assistant in a dorm my junior year, got some small scholarships and grants, including one for just getting good grades, and did take out some loans.  I graduated with little debt, and what I had was paid off a couple of years after graduation.

The summer before my senior year, I went to Colorado to work at The Broadmoor as a waitress. I met Rick, and the rest is history. I finished my senior year at Southern Colorado State College and did a second bout of student teaching (one in Minnesota and one in Colorado). When I graduated, there were few teaching jobs, so I applied at The Gazette as a stopgap.

One day, I was telling someone about how Mr. B helped me go to college. They said, “Did you ever really thank him?” I realized I hadn’t done it properly. So I tracked him down in Wisconsin, where he had retired.  I wrote him a letter. The gist of it was: You changed my life. And I told him about what I was doing. I invited him to our upcoming class reunion, and he came!

His daughter caught me that night at the reunion and said, “I’ve only seen my dad cry maybe twice in his life. One of them was when he read your letter.”

Well, I never did become an English teacher. I discovered I didn’t like teaching as a profession.  More discipline issues than teaching time. Too much paperwork and too many parents. I fell in love with journalism and stayed at The Gazette for 32 years.  Meanwhile, Mother said that Daddy often bragged around town about his daughter, who was a college graduate. Kind of pissed me off.

To be fair, when he realized I wasn’t to be deterred from my path, he did make the $100 down payment on my room and board because I didn’t have a checking account set up yet. He said if I saw it through, I didn’t have to pay him back. One other time, near the end of my junior year, he gave me $20 to tide me over until the summer. Good thing, because I was almost out of toothpaste and pantyhose.

But college changed my life in other ways. For the first time, I was on my own, and without Cindy.

Truth be told, we had started to drift apart in high school, when she was lively, funny, and popular, and I was still the quiet, serious student. She had many friands. I had Mary C.  Mother did push me to be more inclusive, have a pajama party for girls at Grandad’s cabin, etc. But I never really felt like part of the crowd, even when it was my party.

But Cindy and I had been inseparable for so many years, the drifting apart was gradual, and as I became more involved in my own future, her life was less involved in mine.

When I was home from college, she would seldom be around, off with friends or her current boyfriend, or working.

Our planet was crumbling. We were moving into separate orbits, no longer aligned.

It was many years before we regained our planetary equilibrium.

I moved to Colorado; she went to Idaho, then Alaska. We were physically separated, and our lives went in very different directions.

She did move to Colorado Springs briefly, but we felt a little bit estranged from one another for reasons I won’t delineate.

The Pigg sisters had truly gone our separate ways.

In recent years, our planets began to intersect again — emotionally, more than anything.

That’s why we got together to tell our story. It was a rare, wonderful childhood with ups and downs, but we always connected on some level until geography broke us apart. Maybe more than geography.

But that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for listening to our tales.