It Made of Me an Alien Apart



 The family story goes that they could not get me to run away from home so they ran away from me. Certainly seemed that way in January 1964 when I unpacked my trunk in my dorm room. I was still in Albuquerque, where I mostly grew up, but my family was in Lakewood, Colorado. I met my friends from high school as usual at the Student Union Building but it wasn't the same. They were townies and I was now a dorm resident. I soon gave up getting a sack lunch from the cafeteria so I could eat with them.

When the various breaks in the school year came my new friends went home. I, at first, went to where my family lived. But clearly that was no longer home. I began making plans to spend breaks somewhere else. Or to stay in the dorm and study in the library. I could stand alone.

This morning in a chat with my sister she asked why I cared about the election outcome so much. I love history. Why she asked. Why people do what they do. What they did. It struck me that my studies are in so many ways my family. My books, my paints, my studio. Google. And then a talking head on the news show began talking about why the deep division in our country. We keep wanting to blame race, he said, but maybe it is education. What we call the working class, as if we all do not work, voted for Trump. And the college educated voted for Biden. Did my family make me a Democrat by sending me off to college?

I must have been a disappointment because for many years when they were still around I was a registered Republican. And I even worked for a decade with an international construction firm. Mother called it my redneck period even though I worked in the computer department. But I had a hard hat for trips to the site.

Why do we label? Why do we seek to divide ourselves? Why must me have classes like castes in India. Why did I feel so alienated from the family who ran away from me? Dad used to visit me at college. He would take me to dinner at some of the old familiar places. And one particular down period I asked him to take me home. I didn't want to be there anymore. He said I was home. This was my home. Life happens and events in our lives change our path, he said. "You changed my path," I protested. 

He told me the story of enlisting in the Army to fight in WWII at being separated in basic training from all the friends he had enlisted with and put into the Army Air Corps soon to be the air force. Being made an officer. Not being able to play poker with his old buddies who were just enlisted men. It took him a while to realize he was where he needed to be.

I guess I am. And I guess I will never understand how anyone could vote for Trump. I can identify with Kamala Harris. Did putting her on a bus to a different school make her an alien with her old friends?

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