After the Story - Choices Like Rivers Episode 6
After the Story - Choices Like Rivers Episode 6
This podcast discusses each chapter of Choices Like Rivers and each episode is posted directly after the book episode. This episode corresponds with Chapter 3 Section 2 in the book.
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I remember taking business class at a vo-tech (that is what we called the vocational schools back then). I had taken a couple of classes my senior year and loved it there.
I had gotten married in December of my senior year. By the end of school, I was just barely pregnant. Because I had gotten married, my mother abandoned the idea of college for me. There were two choices back then and since I took the marriage route, the college route had disappeared.
So much so that her and dad took my entire college fund and built a new house with it. So, in the fall after my senior year, all pregnant, I went to vo-tech school on my own.
I was able to get government grants to pay for it and because my husband made good money for the two of us. I didn’t need to work.
The clickety-clack of the typewriter keys still resonate in my fingers. I loved typing. It was tactile and fascinating. In fact I loved everything about business school.
It was while taking bookkeeping that I learned I had a form of dyslexia. I would total long columns of numbers and if there was an error it was always because I had swapped two numbers. Instead of 2346 I would key in 2436 or some such modification.
This was my own discovery and I realized if I concentrated, I could overcome it, so I did. But it revealed so much about how I learned or couldn’t learn.
I had taken piano lessons for a few years but when forced to learn from memory two songs for contest, I couldn’t.
No matter how I tried I could only remember one. I would swap sections and get them all tangled into a mess of one song. I did try. I tried very hard, but no matter how much I tried I just couldn’t do it and I had no idea why.
My piano teacher was furious. Since I hadn’t been able to memorize the songs, which I had grown to hate, I left the sheet music at home instead of bringing it to my next lesson.
That made my music teacher even angrier. She stopped my lesson short and marched me out to the car where my mother was waiting. Short terse words ensued. That is the day I quite taking piano lessons. I did play for year on my own. I played the music I wanted to play, but was never able to memorize music.
I also couldn’t learn dates. My mother was my fifth grade teacher and her favorite subject to teach was history. I can still see her standing behind her huge old wooden desk in front of the blackboard raising her hand and quoting, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Remembering when Columbus sailed the ocean blue was easy. It was in a song. But for the life of me I could not learn just random dates. March 5, 1956 would come out March 19, 1965.
Measurements were the same. One cup? One-quarter cup? I would have to stop and really think about that.
In high school I loved Algebra though. I don’t know how that worked but somehow it did.
Sharon was loving business school just the way I did, that is until a pregnant student came to class and forced Sharon to remember the most painful day in her life. The mix of emotions came unexpectedly and she was ill equipped to deal with them particularly in a public setting.
Ironically it was the pregnant student Patty who bought the comfort that Sharon needed. They bonded. But, what was really drawing Sharon to Patty? Was it friendship or the very fact that Patty was about to give birth?
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