An Unconventional Life

My daughter, Elise, challenged me to write this essay. My beloved daughter, a third-generation Grinnellian currently working for Grinnell College’s Office of Communications, hit me with, “It won’t hurt you to reflect on your life, Mom.” So, here I sit, an expat in Costa Rica, listening to children’s gleeful shouts in Spanish, mountains all around me, considering my life and how Grinnell affected me.

I attended Grinnell in the ’70s, in a period of unrest, and I was a born rebel. It was the first time in my life that I had been intellectually challenged, and I shall be forever grateful for that. At the time, we were all indoctrinated to the “Grinnell Experience,” the idea that people in the world would value us for our amazing liberal arts education.

I left Grinnell after two years, for several reasons. I found the student body to be a bit too neurotically obsessive for me, and there was a paucity of class offerings. More immediately, I had fallen in love with a rather infamous Grinnellian, the late great Chris Freeberg ’73. He had the best Bose 901 speakers on North Campus and the dubious distinction of getting kicked out for not attending classes for an entire semester while he blasted Grateful Dead tunes from the top of Gates Tower. It was an auspicious beginning that launched me on a life of adventure. I scoffed at the “Grinnell Experience” once I realized that almost no one had heard of Grinnell, and because it was the ’70s and scoffing was an art we had mastered.

But Grinnell never left me. Academically, it was never matched by my further university experiences, but there was something more. At Grinnell, through my own endeavors and the encouragement of professors, I learned that I could research anything, reason anything, attempt anything. It was subtle, but it was deeply ingrained in me.

I had business aptitude, honed in me by my father and his cronies, who taught me how to work a room — “Never sit down, Jane. You’ll be stuck with the boring people.” How to read a balance sheet, how to make business decisions, how to do public speaking, how to order a sophisticated drink. And business I did. But the rebel in me kept taking long absences to discover the world, to become a river guide, to wander cross-country. This side of me eventually won out.

I have been plagued at times with the thought that I never “lived up to my potential,” careerwise. I do truly wish I had finished at Grinnell. But nights spent under the stars on the banks of a river, listening to a wound up executive from Los Angeles baring his soul, telling me there had to be something more; days spent tutoring Native American kids, attending truancy hearings, reading Huck Finn to tough teenage native boys as they lay on couches around me; homeschooling my own kids, standing in front of a white board, them in their pajamas, giving them spelling words like “plebian” and “proletariat” as we all giggled — these are the things that have mattered, the things that make up the kaleidoscope of my life.

And in a very real way, I have Grinnell to thank for this. My Grinnell experience opened my eyes to my abilities, and to the world. I sit here in Costa Rica, loving my life, struggling to become fluent in Spanish — why did I take French? — wondering what will come next. Thank you, Elise, for challenging me. And thank you, Grinnell, for all that you gave me.

P.S. I still wish I had become an archaeologist. And I had a huge crush on Gerald Lalonde, classics professor extraordinaire.