Love the 'do Marty!

For whatever reason, sometimes we have the opportunity to be thankful in spite of the most horrific circumstances.  The following story is one of those “most horrific circumstances” that I am now currently thankful for (or someone is).

Star date:  The end of my freshman year in college. Twas May of 1994, and I had just finished  a full year of college at this institution of higher learning and even higher rules of living.  Most college students leave their freshman year of college and head home for the summer.  Ya know, hang out with the old classmates and brag about who went to the best parties that year.  Going to PCC however left little room for conversations like these and more room to try to figure out anything at all about what was going on in popular culture,(“No, I’ve never heard of Ace of Base, are they good?”).  Plus my parents lovingly dropped me off at school in September of ’03 from my lifetime hometown of Fremont, Ohio and immediately (meaning that day) moved to Tucson, AZ – but thankfully they left me the address.

So as is the college ritual toward the end of the school year, I looked for someone to give me a ride from Pensacola, Florida to Tucson, AZ.  And if you were going to LA, that would be fine too because route 10 goes all the way across the country, baby!

Allison eventually got in touch with me and asked me to meet her at the Commons one day with a group of people who would be riding across the country together.  When I arrived, I found Allison, Kim, and John waiting for me and we talked for a bit, getting to know each other before we made this insanely long road trip as a group.  Allison was finishing her sophomore year as a Criminal Justice major, Kim, too, would be a senior the following year, John suffered along with me in having 3 more years of college to go.

So we decided on a time and a place to meet after our schools graduation ceremony (figuring if possible we could break out somewhere in between the 3rd and 18th verses of the schools alma mater song) and exchanged pleasantries as we went, living our lives for the rest of the year.

Finally the day arrived that we would be leaving for the year.  We were scheduled to meet at 11:45 am in the center of campus, pack our car up, and drive away.  I guess that schedule worked for two of us as John and I were the only ones to arrive.  Of course this was long before cell phones were readily available (actually, I’d be interested in knowing if you can have one at PCC) so we simply had to wait.  12.  12:15.  12:30.  I’m starting to get impatient.  1 rolls around and there is still no Allison or Kim.  Maybe they thought we were freaks, I quipped inside my own head.

Finally at 2:00 pm, our two heroines arrived apologetically after having dropped a friend off at the airport “and it took longer than we thought it would.”  Either way, at this point already on this Friday John and I were irritated, so we let it go, packed up the car, and headed west.