Travails of a 40 Year Old Community College Scholar

I am forty years old and I am coloring in pictures of anolis lizards on a worksheet handed out by the biology teacher. This is the first time I’ve a had a box of Crayolas within reaching distance since my eighteen year-old daughter was a small child (my thirteen year-old son eschewed coloring in favor of sword fighting, a result of seeing 300 at the theatres too early in life). The crayon in my hand this time around served no greater purpose than to further my higher education.

I color the anolis lizards with slender bodies and long tails yellow. The stocky anolis lizards with short tails get the purple Crayola treatment.

On a second worksheet, I color the outlines of four islands inhabited by the anolis lizards. Cuba gets the magenta Crayola, Jamaica the green. Hispaniola I shade with the jazzberry jam and Puerto Rico I mango tango-ize.

This is some top tier refrigerator work, I think. My hard-working wife is going to be so proud of her studious husband coloring anolis lizards like a goddam grade school genius. I wonder if she’ll appreciate the pointillism technique I incorporated on Cuba…

The eight other students in this classroom had only known one President of the United States since graduating junior high. They look impossibly young in every conceivable way and tend to keep a half classroom distance between themselves and the sullen, bald guy muttering darkly to himself (me, somehow). Coloring anolis lizards and Caribbean Islands doesn’t seem quite the soul-deadening proposition to them. If anything, the prospect of such an easy grade motivates them to color inside the lines.

My humiliation makes no sense to them, which I suppose makes sense to me. They are of a different generation whereas I am closer to the coffin than to the coloring book.

This wasn’t the life I plotted for myself twenty-two years ago, back when Bush Sr. was stepping out of office. I had the opportunity to attend Ball State and pursue a degree in journalism, but I was unsure how I would react to an environment which called for me to wash my own clothes and locate an entirely new marijuana supplier. So I made the fateful decision to stay closer to my mother’s home and our shared drug dealers.

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Having decided to remain in The Region, I enrolled at Indiana University Northwest where I dumped my journalism major for what I perceived to be a growing career market in African American studies. It wasn’t for me. I dropped out after a semester and a half and jumped into a more lucrative field. Factory work.

Thing about me is I’m not very mechanically inclined. And it seemed every machine I ran across involved some sort of work of a mechanical nature. I faked it as well as I could. Moving south to Alabama helped since the change in geography immediately made me the smartest man of every room I entered. An easy task so long as you are constantly aware which rooms you are entering.

Twenty years can pass very quickly, especially when you add a wife and children into the experience. The job I hired in at to keep me in booze, drugs and three hundred dollar rattletrap automobiles suddenly became an essential means to keep my children fed and housed. I mooched the drugs and booze off my friends as long as I could before having to give it up altogether once my friends abandoned me.

One day, I stopped what I was doing. Raised my head and discovered I was forty years old with a hairline like the outline of Cuba. Widowed once, now married to a woman who not only supported my dreams of respectability but also realized my life as an absurdist machinist was at an end. We decided I needed to return to school and either complete my degree in African American studies or get the education I needed to teach southern folks the proper use of the English.

I knew I made a mistake during student orientation.

I hated the student coordinator immediately. I hated the way he over enunciated his every word hoping to convey the stellar grades he earned in Speech 106. I hated him before he even spoke. His red hair and general smugness were the peanut butter and jelly crying out for me to make an annihilation sandwich out of him.

Mostly, I hated him because he was half my age and there he was standing before the student orientation seminar telling us, telling me, what a fun adventure college was going to be as though we were embarking on a day trip to Disneyland.

“Take out your smart phones,” he said, perfectly, “and call up your twitter account.”

I did not take out my phone. I did not go to my twitter account. I did not possess a smart phone. My phone had a compass and a sundial carved into the jawbone inlay. I was on the half G network, keeping me in contact with anyone within a three mile radius. There would be no tweeting, no instagramming, no facebooking, or myspacing, or livejournaling.

“Hashtag Calhoun State in your tweet,” he continued. “First one wins a prize.”

A tenth of a second later, the prize, a fanny pack embossed with the Calhoun State logo was awarded to a brunette who looked to be all of about twelve years old.

I surprised even myself with how quickly the bitterness bubbled up from the back of my mind. This was supposed to be a fresh start for me after twenty years of stagnation. The excitement, the anticipation of giving over the focus of my life to educational pursuits lasted exactly one early afternoon.

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Then the student coordinator, his hair shining under the fluorescent lighting like cinnamon dust, withdrew several inflated beach balls from behind the podium and swatted them into the sparse audience of recent high school graduates who hadn’t applied themselves well enough to get accepted into decent universities and middle-aged waitresses looking to make the leap to nurse’s assistant.

“Come…on…people! Let’s have some… FUN!”

I half hoped the ball would get knocked my way so I could drive my pen through it. No one hit it my way. Hell, no one even glanced in my direction. I sat alone. Maybe I was showing too much chest hair. It happened sometimes. I disliked buttoning the top two buttons of my shirts. That coupled with the luxurious mat of chest hair I’d cultivated since childhood gave me the appearance of a groovy guy having just fallen out of the nineteen seventies.

I would say I was too old for this, but, then again, was there ever a time I’d purposefully slap around a beach ball without a Jimmy Buffet concert in the vicinity?

Everyone around me was excited. In two years they would be joining the alumni who went on to wipe elderly asses in old folks’ homes or became shift managers at the local fast food joints.

Little did I know, a year and a half later, I would be coloring anolis lizards with a fistful of Crayolas. I think I suspected, but hoped I would somehow come to embrace becoming a community college scholar, a Thomas Jefferson of the Pell Grant community. It’s something to shoot for. If just anyone could do this, they would… right?