for kicks, I took an evening course at the local community college in the autumn quarter of that year, and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how easy it’d been.
I took another course during the winter quarter, and that one was even easier.
I latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community college that winter, and we both skipped the spring quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I started taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn’t really have any kind of academic goal; you might just say I was majoring in everything.
Wouldn’t Everything 101 be an interesting course title?
That went on for a couple years, and by then I’d racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My dad didn’t say anything about my snooping around the edges of the world of learning, but he was keeping track of my progress.
There was another strong odor of collusion about what happened in late November of 1992. We’d been invited to the Greenleafs’ for Thanksgiving dinner, and after we’d all eaten too much, my dad and the boss got involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only four saws, and orders were starting to back up because each saw could only cut so much door stock in eight hours. This meant that the boss had to pay a lot of overtime, which was great for the sawyers right at first, but after it got to be a habit, there was a lot of grumbling about ten- or twelve-hour days. The solution was fairly simple. It’s called swing shift. One sawyer would have to work from four in the afternoon until half past midnight. There’d now be five sawyers instead of four, and the boss wouldn’t have to buy a new saw or pay overtime.
Guess who got elected for swing shift. And guess who’d now have all kinds of free time during the normal daytime hours at Everett Community College. And guess who was coerced into taking a full course load. And guess who was the only one in the room who didn’t know this was coming.
You guessed ‘er, Chester.
I think the Twinkie Twins got more entertainment out of this elaborate scam than anybody else did. They were high-school freshmen now, but they’d reverted to whispering in twin-speak, giving me those sickeningly cute smirks, and giggling.
I carried a full course load in both the winter and spring quarters in 1993, and that satisfied the requirements for graduation. It’d taken me four years to reach the point that a full-time student achieves in two, but I was now an Associate in Arts and Sciences—with honors, no less. And I had a major in English, but with a lot of those “everything” courses that didn’t apply.
I went through the cap and gown ceremony with the Austins and Greenleafs in the audience, and after the ceremony we all went back to Greenleaf Manor for another of those “let’s steer Mark in the right direction” sessions at which I was usually outnumbered six to one.
Inga Greenleaf led the assault. “What in the world were you thinking of, Mark?” she demanded, waving a copy of my transcript at me. “Your grades are very good, but half the courses you took weren’t even remotely connected to your major.”
“I didn’t have a major when I started, Inga,” I explained. “I was just browsing. It was only after a year or so that I finally settled on English.”
“There are some definite holes in this,” she told me, still brandishing my transcript. “I’ve checked with the University of Washington, and you’ll have to take a couple of courses this summer to fill in the gaps. Les has contacts with some local banks, and your grades are good enough to qualify you for a student loan.”
I threw a quick look at my dad. We’d already discussed that at some length. He shook his head slightly.
“I’m sorry, Inga,” I said flatly. “Let’s just forget that student loan business. Sooner or later, I’m going to have a mortgage on a house biting chunks out of my paychecks, and probably car payments as well—that ol’ Dodge can’t run forever. I’m not going to add a student loan on top of that. I won’t hand three-quarters of my paycheck to the Last National Bank to pay interest. I’ll look for a part-time job, but no jobbee, no schoolie, and that’s final.”
“Oh, goodie!” one of the twins said, clapping her hands together. “We get to keep him!”
“Shush, Twink,” her mother snapped. I don’t think she even realized that my Twinkie invention had crept into her vocabulary.
The boss was squinting at the far wall. “When you get right down to it, Mark, you’ve already got a part-time job.”
“It’s full-time, isn’t it?” I replied.
“Of course it is,” he replied sardonically. “A guy who works by the hour paces himself to make the job fit the time. If you bear down, I’ll bet you could finish up in four or five hours a night, and if it starts to pile up, you could clear away the leftovers on Saturday.”
“And if you’re really serious about getting an education, you can live at home and commute to the university,” my mom added. “Your dad and I can’t send you to Harvard, but we can give you a place to live and regular meals. That way, you won’t have to rent an apartment or buy groceries.”
“Our big brother’s going to get away from us after all,” one of the twins lamented in mock sorrow.
“Nothing lasts forever, Twink,” I told her.
“Who’s going to tie our little shoes?” the other twin said.
“Or glove our little hands?” the first girl added.
“You’ll both survive,” I told them. “Be brave and strong and true, and you’ll get by.”
They stuck their tongues out at me in perfect unison.
“This is going to crowd you, Mark,” Les warned me. “You won’t have very much free time. Don’t make the same mistake I made when I went there. I managed to party my way onto the flunk-out list in just two years.” “I’m not big on parties, boss,” I assured him. “Listening to a bunch of half-drunk guys ranting about who’s going to make it to the Rose Bowl doesn’t thrill me. We can give the university a try, I guess, and if it doesn’t work out—ah, well.”
I filled in the gaps on my transcript that summer, and on a bright September morning, I drove down to the University of Washington to register. After I’d plodded through all the bureaucratic nonsense, I wandered the beaten paths to knowledge for a while—long beaten paths, I might add, since the campus measures about a mile in every direction. I finally found Padelford Hall, home of the English Department. After I’d located my classrooms, I drove back to Everett to get to work.
I took a stab at the “full-bore” business the boss had mentioned, and I found that he was right. I cleared everything away in just under five hours. That made me feel better.
Classes began the following Monday, and my first class, American Literature, started at eight-thirty. There was a kind of stricken silence in the classroom when the instructor entered. “It’s Conrad!” I heard a strangled whisper just behind me.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the white-haired professor said crisply. “Your regularly scheduled instructor has recently undergone coronary bypass surgery, so I’ll be filling in for him this quarter. For those of you who don’t recognize me, I’m Dr. Ralph Conrad.”
