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Monday, July 14, 2003

Ebb and High Tides

I was a sophomore in college and as poor as I’ve ever been. I was living in the dormitory at IU which I could barely afford. A campus job--that I was lucky to find--paid the bills with almost nothing left over after my basic needs were met. My checking account was balanced down to the last cent and I mean that literally. I’ve only bounced one check in my entire life and that humiliating experience was during that lean year.

My barely-existent social life consisted of dorm floor mixers, free campus movies, and occasionally crashing a frat party for the free booze. I didn’t feel deprived; almost everyone I knew at school was poor. What I did have was a room and all the food I could eat at the dorm cafeteria. Classes and work kept me too busy to think much about my lack of social life. I simply felt that my sacrifice was all in the name of working toward a better future.

I was taking French as my foreign language requirement. I had a great graduate assistant as my teacher and this was the only one of my classes that I had fun attending. It was a pretty easy grade compared to the rest of my load and there were lots of beautiful girls in the class. I don’t think that I missed a single French class that year.

One evening after my lowly job attending animals in a biology lab I stopped off at one of the small branch libraries to study. It was in one of the old dormitories that was a residence for smart, broke students. I liked to study at that small library because there were fewer distractions than at the main branch where the fraternity/sorority crowd held court.

Bored with my economics text, I wandered around the stacks until I came upon a bunch of novels in French. Among these was an edition of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger edited by Germaine Bree. This edition has a glossary in the back obviating the need for an English/French dictionary. I brought the book back to my table and opened to the first page and began reading.

I was amazed that I was able to read the novel with only occasional glances at the glossary. I realized that I understood a foreign language. Not bad for a hick kid like me. To this day I find few things in life as rewarding as reading or speaking a foreign language. If I got nothing else from my stay at Indiana University, I began a love of languages.

At some point around the middle of that school year I received an extremely modest windfall of cash, frightfully small, perhaps $200 or so. I can’t remember where it came from; it may have been a tax refund. All that I knew was that I was suddenly rich. The world was my oyster. I deposited the money in my exhausted checking account and started considering my options as to how I might spend this money. I was fairly drunk with my new purchasing possibilities. It was like something out of a Dickens novel, like I had a secret benefactor.

It seems incredible that someone who couldn’t scrape up a couple of bucks to buy a pitcher of beer was going to attend a summer school program in France but that’s what I decided I was going to do. I forget how much the program cost, more than my meager windfall, but I felt that I could build on this small chunk of cash sitting in my checking account. A lousy $200 was enough to get me to think beyond the realm of my boring classes and my dumb job. $200 changed my life.

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