It was the spring of 1976. I was 23, smart, fierce, on everybody’s most-likely-to succeed list. But as my undergraduate mentor had predicted, I was still a babe in the woods, having wandered 2,059 miles from the sheltering mountains of my childhood home. In the daytime, I swaggered around the Chapel Hill campus carrying piles of thick books on American history, picked arguments so I could wow people with my thesis that Southern liberals were always more Southern than liberal, collected accolades as I once collected gold stars.
At night, though, I was alone and tearful. Largely because of my thesis about the Southernness of Southern liberals, I had found no friends. I longed for those I had left behind in Globe and Tucson, with whom I could watch grainy foreign films at the Rialto, talk into the wee hours about “Birches” and Look Homeward, Angel, walk through the lane of orange trees near the dorm, so inspired by the intoxicating aroma that I tried out my atrophied right brain and waxed poetic. And of course I had never had a real boyfriend–only one clandestine relationship with the fiancé of a college friend, the first man who expressed a remote interest in relieving my frustrated virginity. And the situation in Chapel Hill was no different. It was 1976, after all, and too-bright women still stayed home on Saturday nights. Continue reading →
