Tag Archives: University of Pittsburgh

The 4.0 Of It All

03 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, race, Youth

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Larry Fitzgerald pulling away from Steelers Defense, Super Bowl XLIII, February 1, 2009. (http://zimbio.com).

This time twenty years, I was a week or so away from turning in a 4.0 first semester of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. It wasn’t exactly first and foremost on my mind at the time. I was just trying to get through the semester, and I was beginning to run out of gas. Between my independent study course with Larry Glasco and my graduate semester in pre-1877 US history, not to mention my third-semester Swahili course and History of Black Pittsburgh class, I’d been too swamped to pay attention to my grades. It was a sure sign that I was no longer in the mindset of a Humanities student, a grinder concerned only with A’s. It was also a sign of how much the gatekeepers in Pitt’s history department had pissed me off.

Black Image in the White Mind (1987), George M. Fredrickson, December 3, 2011. (http://tower.com).

I know for an absolute certainty what I was doing by the end of the first week in December ’91. I was putting together what would become a forty-five page master’s paper comparing the intercultural and multicultural education movements in US history for Larry, while also finalizing my master’s readings paper on African American self-perceptions during an after slavery. It was a counter to George Fredrickson’s book The Black Image in the White Mind (1987). I was also in the midst of doing interviews for a paper on civil rights activists in Pittsburgh and the collaboration (or lack thereof) between Black and White activists in the 1960s. Swahili, really, was easier, as all I had left was to convince my Tanzanian teacher Rashidi that I was proficient in conversational Swahili.

Luckily, I’d already been in a zone since the beginning of November, so none of what I now had left to work on was a last-minute deal. I knocked off all of these tasks and more a full week before the end of the semester. For some odd reason, I was completely confident that I’d done well. I just didn’t know that I’d earned straight-As for only the second time in ten years, or in four semesters.

But that was only about a quarter of what was important at the time. In addition to my actual grades, I’d knocked off two graduate-level seminars that semester (counting my independent studies course), and in the process, knocked off my two master’s papers for the degree. In the middle of the semester, I took and passed my language requirement for my master’s, taking a written proficiency exam in Swahili — despite some initial push-back from Larry to take it in Spanish.

I also used a loophole in the University of Pittsburgh handbook to allow I graduate seminar I took my junior year to be counted toward my master’s degree a year and a half later. Once again, I had to go over the head of our LSD-affected graduate advisor, Joe White and the department chair to the dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Pitt. I cited the exact code in the handbook that allowed me to count as many as nine credits from my undergraduate courses toward my master’s degree, provided that these were graduate-level courses to begin with. And, they approved the use of my Comparative Slavery course as credit to this degree as well.

Having done all of that, having survived an asthmatic cough — my first sign that I had asthma, really — that had lasted more than a third of the semester, having shaken off all of my doubters in the department. I realized by the beginning of December that with two more graduate seminars and a graduate course in another field, that I could my master’s done by the end of April. That minor epiphany made my head swim for a few minutes, just before I dove back into my intercultural education research paper.

A week or so later, I talked with my mother about what I knew was about to happen and about what could happen by the end of two semesters of graduate school. She said, “Well you showed them! You know, you never liked to be told you can’t do something.” I knew this was true. But as I said in response, “But that wasn’t and can’t be the main reason I continue to do this,” I knew that so much more motivated me than the professors who doubted me or getting straight-As.

The point of all of this was so that I could find a purpose for my life and all of the skills and talent I’d been blessed with. This great first semester was merely the start of the journey, not the end.

A Friendship Changing Lanes

03 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, race, Religion

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Changing Lanes (Movie, 2002) Screen Shot, March 2008. (Source/http://swedenborgiancommunity.org).

Part of the problem of being me is the fact that my close friends change as I change. Meaning that there have been transitional periods throughout my life that my old friends fall away. Oftentimes I make new ones, and sometimes, like during my six years in Humanities, my best friend was my imagination. Ironically, the best friendship I had from my Humanities days came with a classmate that I hadn’t become close to until my last couple of years at Mount Vernon High School. More ironically, that friendship didn’t truly become such until we both went away for college in ’87.

I’ve written about her before, the valedictorian of my class, whom I called “V” in a previous post (see Valedictorian Blues from July ’09). To be honest, I’m not sure how our acquaintanceship ever became a friendship. Somewhere between having circumstances in which our fathers weren’t around consistently, or at least being able to relate to Billy Joel, or both of us scoring “5”s on the AP US History exam.

But really, it might’ve just come down to both of us not belonging, or facing a small degree of ostracism from our Humanities and MVHS classmates overall. I wasn’t Black and cool enough, and V, well, she was a classic White nerd, a grinder who had the gall to finish ahead of our Black male salutatorian, at least from the perspective of some authority figures and the school’s popular crowd.

The fact that we went our respective ways, to Pitt and Johns Hopkins, helped. The fact that we wrote each other about some of our social triumphs and challenges helped more. Most importantly, it helped a lot that we both were more honest about our family troubles. Everything from my mother’s need to divorce my idiot stepfather and the issues with my younger siblings to V’s mother and her health issues and struggling with burnout trying to watch over her family while going to school.

So, by the time I began my second year of grad school, we’d become fairly close. I visited her and her family in the DC area eight times during the ’90s, and went to her mother’s funeral and wake in ’96. V came to my PhD graduation ceremony the following year. By ’97, me and V had been friends for ten years, and known each other more than fifteen. For more than six years, she’d really been the only person from my Humanities and high school days with whom I’d been in regular contact.

Changing lanes, Las Vegas Strip, December 12, 2010. (Source/Bjørn Giesenbauer - http://Flickr.com).

Who knew that within four years of marching for my doctorate that our friendship would become a distant one? I think that our approaches to life was so different that we couldn’t help but become distant friends. I am one who refuses to take life on its own terms. If I had taken V’s approach, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon, New York, only with a nine-dollar-an-hour job sorting mail or flipping carcinogenic burgers. V’s was based on some sort of realism that mixed with a sense of eugenic inevitability. That one’s slot in life should remain such, and if one does make it, one must do so without ruffling any feathers.

Besides that, it was obvious that things about who we had been since the early ’80s had evolved, and was changing even more rapidly as we reached our late twenties. I was no longer the blank-faced, closed-mouthed, socially-awkward kid I was in ’82. V was no longer responsible for watching over her mother and her younger sister. We agreed to disagree on so many things. Our politics diverged. Our views on race and racism were growing further apart, as if I was Michael Eric Dyson and she was Ann Coulter.

But even with all of that, I think the seeds of it began when I started dating my future wife at the end of ’95. Something about being in a serious relationship has changed the dynamics of every friendship I had then and have now. I never thought that my friendship with V would be affected. But of course it was. We live in a world where a man and a woman can’t be close friends without it being made into something more than friendship.

Like the seasons, people change, and even if they change for the better, our change will cause our friendships to change as well. It’s just too bad that V couldn’t adapt to all of the good changes in my life like I adapted to hers.

Standing at the Crossroads

28 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, music, New York City, race

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Cast Away movie (2000) screen shot, August 27, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because it is of low resolution and is in no way being used to reproduce the original film.

It’s funny how things in our lives happen in cycles. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t heeded the wisdom we’ve accumulated in our lives to keep us from following that same bad habits, ones that lead to serious problems for much of our lives. Relationships with men and women, addictions and other vices, behaviors that lead to indecision. That last one has been a big one for me to overcome in my life, and it still has the power to keep me for achieving all that I know I can do in life.

It has led to several crossroads in my life. They usually occur in August or December. August, because of the twenty-two years I spent as a student (not to mention fourteen off and on as a professor). And December, because of Christmas, Jesus and my birthday. But Augusts, especially the last five days in August, tend to stand out as times of contemplation and revelation. August ’91 was the start of grad school, while August ’93 made me rethink how to approach grad school. August ’97 left me with bitterness about being unemployed, while August ’99 gave me a new appreciation for having a job, any job.

But, aside from now, no August was more revealing about my character than the one in ’88. About two weeks before I needed to go back to Pittsburgh for my sophomore year, I went to search for Jimme. I was still steamed with him for not getting me the money I needed to secure a dorm room for the upcoming school year. I hardly swung by to see him that summer, too busy taking care of my siblings and recovering from my second roughest year in the decade, one of four months of unemployment. So on the next to last Friday before I needed to get back, I bummed ten dollars from Mom and took the Metro-North down from Pelham to the city. I got off, took the shuttle over to Times Square and the 2 to 72nd before walking over the Levi brothers’ office on West 64th. Jimme wasn’t there, but Glen was. “He’s over at my brother’s on East 59th,” he said. I’d forgotten that Bruce Levi had his own cleaners and business on the East Side.

I walked the dozen or so blocks there. And there Jimme was. I caught him just as he was getting paid for the week. “Bo’ whatcha doin’ up here?,” he said with complete disbelief. We talked for just a few minutes, with me mentioning more than once how I needed money to secure some sort of apartment at school. “Donal’, I done messed up too much money dis summer,” Jimme said. Apparently my father had spent most of Summer ’88 going through one of his drinking binges. The Levi’s had bailed him out several times, as his landlord Mrs. Smalls had toyed with the idea of evicting him. Jimme gave me $100 on the spot, and promised to get me more money before I left. When I went to see him at work the following week, he’d given me $300 more.

In rapid succession, I packed up my stuff in the five-suitcase set Mom had bought me the year before. Two suitcases, two duffel bags, and a garment bag, all of which she’d ordered from a catalog for a measly eighty bucks. I went down to a travel agency that was down the street from the Pelham Metro-North station and C-Town and found a cheap one-way ticket on USAir for $35. I couldn’t buy a good steak dinner in midtown Manhattan for $35! I got myself mentally ready for finding an apartment, ideally a one-bedroom.

By that last Sunday in August, everything was ready, and I had everything I needed. I played songs with my siblings for almost two hours before I left. I gave them my Michael Jackson tapes and my radio cassette player, taking my beat-up Walkman with me. We all hugged and cried, much more so than we had the year before. Part of me really didn’t want to leave, and part of me knew that I wouldn’t be whole again if I didn’t.

I had no idea how tough the next five days would be, between that Sunday evening, August 28 and that Friday, September 2. I was homeless for five days, and within three days of heading back to New York and Mount Vernon when I finally found a one-room death-trap in a row house in which to live.

Fork in the road, August 27, 2011. (Source/http://optimumsportsperformance.com).

I was within three days of becoming a college dropout because I didn’t trust anybody. I was so close to losing something I’d dedicated seven years of my life to achieving because I had spent the previous year indecisive about whether what I wanted out of life was more important than helping out my mother and my younger siblings at 616. It made me think. What meaning could I draw from putting up with all the put-downs and disapprovals of classmates, teachers and families if things hadn’t worked out? The answer would’ve been, none at all.

Now, as then, I face a crossroads in many areas of my life. One where I have to decide, which part of me is most important in achieving my dreams, fulfilling my calling, providing for my son and family, possibly even in maintaining a marriage? Whatever decisions I do make, I need to stand firmly in them, to be decisive, to see them through. That formula has guided me for twenty-three years. And it has yet to let me down.

Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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Hostess Suzy-Q's 8-pack with Reggie Jackson baseball cards, circa 1979, just the way I remember them (made with lard), September 24, 2007. (Source/http://www.flickr.com/photos/wafflewhiffer/1436601166)

I sometimes think that me being a weird dude — because I often spend my time in contemplation — often attracts people in my life of all types. Including people weirder or more eccentric than me. As those closest to me can attest, I’ve awaken many a morning with ideas to write down, with dreams to interpret and deep epiphanies to discuss. All while still needing to pee and brush my teeth — so I multitask!

Twenty years ago, I was in deep thought almost every day going into my first semester of grad school. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t part of my original plan to earn a master’s degree. And it was obvious from dealing with the folks in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh that many didn’t want me there (see “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11). Either because of my familiarity with them, or because I was Black, or because I was still only twenty-one, or because they knew I’d study race more than class and neo-Marxist theory.

Whatever the case, I knew one thing for certain. That Professor Larry Glasco would end up being my advisor. Glasco was the only professor out of twenty-nine in the department who specialized in African American history, and he’d been there since the year I was born, ’69. He was likely hired in the midst of universities, fearful of black student groups and their protests over mistreatment and lack of diversity — hiring one Black here and one Black there to meet the protesters demands. Actually, not likely. Glasco, like the start of the

Larry Glasco delivering a special lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, October 12, 2007. (Source/http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=1002).

Black Studies (now Africana Studies) Department and the hiring of Dr. Jack Daniel, was all a response to protests and a major sit-in by the Black Action Society in the 1968-69 school year.

But I digress. I’d taken a history majors reading course with Glasco my junior year, and we occasionally talked. Other than that, I didn’t know much about the fifty-year old, six-foot-five and very light man.

Though I did begin to find out. Mid-August then and now is big in Western Pennsylvania, as it’s football preseason. Since my NY Giants had won the Super Bowl that January, I was satisfied and not at all in a football mood. I’d gone out that third Sunday in August to go to Hillman Library, continue my work on my multicultural education article, grab cheap grub at 7-Eleven, and sit at one of the benches outside of William Pitt (Student) Union to eat and smell the sulfuric air.

Glasco walked up and greeted me. We talked, mostly about how I planned to fulfill requirements like proficiency in a foreign language (I decided on Swahili, much to Glasco’s chagrin) and what my master’s paper should be about. I didn’t understand — and quite frankly, I still don’t now — why many professors practice this opaque way of giving advice to students, advice that can easily come off as commands.

Anyway, Glasco then chatted me up about the upcoming ’91 NFL season, about the Steelers and the injury bug. Some major draft pick had blown out his knee, torn ACL and MCL. Between that and what happened to then LA Raiders great Bo Jackson in the ’90 playoffs against Cincinnati, Glasco said, “Maybe it’s their diet. Maybe they’re eating too many Suzy-Q’s.”

My mouth fell to the table attached to the bench where I was sitting, keeping it from hitting the sidewalk three feet below. Over-trained muscles, steroids, Astroturf, vicious hits, and your answer is “Suzy-Q’s,” I thought? Really? I didn’t think that what Glasco had suggested was dumb, just weird. Really weird. I said, with a post-gasp chuckle, “Well, I don’t think that eating Suzy-Q’s has much to do with a ligament tear…” Before I could complete that thought, Glasco continued for another ten minutes about diet and how these athletes don’t watch what they eat compared to the guys in football in the ’60s and ’70s. I thought and said, “Really? Because I remember guys who’d smoke during these games, not to mention drinking and eating hot dogs.”

Of course, years of sports research and Sports Illustrated articles confirmed everything I learned from watching and playing sports by the naive old age of twenty-one. Not to mention a former wide receiver by the name of Marvin Harrison, who for years made a point of eating a pack of Suzy-Q’s before a game, only to turn in one of the all-time great NFL careers with the Indianapolis Colts.

But the bigger point from my conversation with Glasco was that I’d found a professor and advisor who was a nice guy, but actually weirder than me. And made me feel strangely comfortable with him and with being at Pitt for my master’s. Still, I sensed that I’d eventually need to go someplace else if I wanted to start and finish a doctorate or do something else educationally. A Suzy-Q hypothesis could only take me so far.

Crazy

13 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pop Culture, Youth

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Seal, CD Cover (1991), August 13, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a late bloomer. I came to find myself a teenager in a twenty-one year old’s body twenty years ago, just as I’m a thirty-five year-old in a forty-one-and-a-half year-old’s body now. As the summer of ’91 began to wind down, though, I realized that I needed to go into my first year of grad school at Pitt with some inspiration, with a chip on my shoulder, really.

It didn’t take more than a simple thought to find that inspiration and chip, either. Between working for a bunch of folks at my Western Psych job who still thought that hunting down half-and-half was the extent of my work there on the one hand. And professors like Reid Andrews telling me after I’d received my grad school stipend award letter that I wasn’t “graduate school material” on the other hand. Livid is the minimal word I’d use to describe my mood in the three weeks before the start of my five-and-half-year odyssey. One of doing cartwheels at least three times better than my colleagues to prove that I was as good as anyone.

But I’m jumping ahead of the story here. I found some inspiration from music, as usual, in this case, on one of my daily walks home from work in Oakland to my studio apartment in East Liberty. Still searching for more new music for my ’90s collection, I found a radio station playing Seal’s first big hit, “Crazy.” I’d heard parts of the song before, all during that summer, but never from start to finish. As I reached the end of Ellsworth Avenue, where I’d walk up the steps to a bridge on Highland Avenue, one that went over the train tracks and busway into East Liberty, I heard the lyrics, really for the first time.

“In a sky full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy
In a world full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy/Crazy
In a heaven of people there’s only some want to fly/Ain’t that crazy”

Seal, "Crazy" 45 Single Cover (UK), January 8, 2009. (Source/http://cover6.cduniverse.com/MuzeAudioArt/140/141811.jpg). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, as version is of low resolution for reproduction, and is part of larger commentary.

And yes, I wanted to fly. Besides, as far as most people were concerned, I was crazy anyway. For wearing that godforsaken kufi to school for three years. For becoming a newborn and sanctimonious Christian after that. For trying out for football, and later, baseball instead of basketball. For listening to Mr. Mister and Tears for Fears and Sting instead of bopping to Run-D.M.C. For walking way too fast, and talking a little too slow. For going off to college out-of-state, to a no-name school no less. For taking a grad course my junior year at Pitt. For deciding to go to grad school in history instead of law school or Black studies.

The list is as long as an introspective Eminem rap sequence, airing every negative ever tossed my way. I was crazy, and still am. But, as far as my first year of grad school was concerned, I made two deals with myself about the process. One was to not compare myself, my abilities, my limitations, to anyone else in the program. The other was to put aside all of my preconceptions about my professors, or the difficult courses ahead, or whether I would complete the master’s degree and move on to the doctoral portion of the program.

I didn’t want to limit myself to what others may have expected of me, or to what I could’ve possibly expected of myself at the time. I didn’t even like my friends saying that “the sky’s the limit,” because I didn’t want to limit myself to the sky. I simply wanted to be crazy enough, humble yet arrogant enough to know my limits, but push the envelope as hard as I could in order to make graduate school work for me.

Howard Hughes standing in front of his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane, Inglewood, California in the 1940s, May 31, 2005. (Source/Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-63333 - In public domain). One of the craziest, yet great, innovators of the 20th century. Guess it works better when you're a rich White male.

That kind of thinking affords a very single-minded intensity — to the point of a near-psychotic passion — that leads to excellence, miracles and the exceeding of what may have been your craziest expectations. I know it was that way for me. It had to be. If I’d bought into all that my most hateful Humanities classmates, my mother and ex-stepfather, my father Jimme, my fellow Mount Vernonites and some of my teachers and professors thought of me, who’s knows? I’d likely become a sexually confused and frustrated Black male, a college dropout, wandering from one minimum wage job to another, living alone in a boarding room, as miserable as a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’d become a psychopath, not just crazy enough to believe in myself and the miracles of God in my life. I need to do be a little crazy now, even at this stage of my life. We all need to be a little crazy, not in a Tea Party sense, but much more in an Arab Spring kind of way. After all, “we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.”

When Being An American Equals Never Having to Say Sorry

08 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, race, Religion

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New York State Social Studies Review and Development Committee Report, June 1991 (Picture/Donald Earl Collins). One of several reports produced for the New York State Education Department and Commissioner, as part of the Commissioner's Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence

Twenty years ago this week, I began writing an academic piece that would lead to my dissertation topic, doctorate and first book Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It was a topic that I’d fall in and then out of love with. Ironically, I pursued this topic because of my academic experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. The topic was multiculturalism, and more specifically, multicultural education, and how to achieve this kind of curriculum reform in K-12 education. Just writing these words makes me feel both young and naive at the same time.

This whole quest started with a girl. Actually, with the young woman “Another E” (see “The Power of Another E” from April ’09 and “Beyond the Asexual Me” from last month”). She wanted to put an article together for publication, in response to what was then a major controversy involving research into the revision of New York State’s social studies and other curricula. The New York State Department of Education had given a committee the task of figuring out how to make the state’s K-12 curriculum more inclusive and representative of the state’s tremendous racial, ethnic and other forms of diversity.

By the end of September ’91, it would produce A Curriculum of Inclusion: Report of the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence. But that deliverable was far from my mind when, tired from my weeks of near starvation post-graduation that April (see “Sometimes Starvation” from May ’11), I reluctantly said okay to working on this article.

Leonard Jeffries, Newark Public Library, February 1, 2007. (http://npl.org)

Now here I was, minus the young woman in whom I no longer had an interest, now working on a piece that had become more academic than either of us had originally intended. By the time I’d written my first words on multiculturalism, I’d already learned the names Leonard Jeffries, Asa Hilliard III and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I’d read articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal about Jeffries’ name-calling, Schlesinger’s incredulousness about calling slaves “enslaved persons,” and about the committee in general getting along like hyenas tearing at a dead wildebeest.

If I’d been just a tad bit smarter, I would’ve done an investigative piece and called and emailed the people on this task force. I would’ve asked them to divulge to me what they would eventually tell the world about their dislike of each other and of anything “multicultural,” which was in quotes for them. For Schlesinger, multicultural was the equivalent of bad ethnic studies or a kind of Afrocentrism that blamed Whites for all that has ailed America and the world for the past 500 years. For Jeffries, it was a racist attempt at appeasing Blacks and other groups of color while maintaining the main theme of Whites on top.

Although this is an oversimplification, it’s not by much. There really wasn’t anyone from the task force, the

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., CUNY, circa 2006, months before his death on February 28, 2007. (http://www.nytimes.com)

NYS Department of Education, or anyone who spoke on the Himalayas-out-of-a-termite-mound controversy over a more inclusive K-12 curriculum without taking one of those two views. That’s what interested me the most. Schlesinger, and eventually, folks like Diane Ravitch, Mario Cuomo and others completely against revision that even approached cultural pluralism, versus Jeffries, Hilliard and others arguing beyond what they called a White multiculturalism.

I didn’t have the capacity at that stage of my life to see myself as a writer or a journalist in any way. Just two years removed from the end of my mother’s marriage to my now idiot ex-stepfather, I only saw the piece that I’d turn into a Master’s research paper, doctoral thesis and first book as an academic exercise, one where I found the philosophical middle. I hadn’t a clue as to how to make myself part of the Ground Zero issue of the first seven years of the ’90s, the Culture Wars.

But I did have one experience that provided unique insight into multiculturalism and the arguments made by scholars and pols on all sides. Six years in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools. A place where cultural diversity and how to deal with it within the curriculum was the elephant in the classroom. Some teachers and classes addressed it, and many didn’t, to the detriment of what was a solid program, not to mention me and the others who were my classmates.

Either way, I saw more issues of diversity crop up where a multiculturalist approach would’ve been helpful all during my time in Humanities, including with my kufi and my Hebrew-Israelite years. It was a missed opportunity, one that I unconsciously wanted to address with my research of and writing on multiculturalism.

Elephant in School, retrieved July 7, 2011. (http://teachhub.com)

A One-Year Sooner “What If?”

18 Saturday Jun 2011

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Through The Wormhole, Star Trek DS9 Style, June 18, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

Today’s twenty-four years since I graduated from Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, New York as part of the Class of ’87. I’ve talked about the events immediately before and after that milestone. I’ve spent a bit of time on the day of the ceremony itself, and will again when I hit the quarter-century anniversary mark next year. Today, though, I want to hypothesize about what would’ve happened if I had decided to graduate one year earlier. I can’t help it. I’m a historian and intellectual, and not just a scholar who cares about research, so I often speculate in order to find answers that are a little outside of the box.

Because of Humanities and AP, many of the best of the best and brightest had or nearly had enough credits to graduate by the end of our junior year, in June ’86. A dozen or more members of the projected Class of ’87 actually took the option of graduating without a senior year. I could’ve myself. I was a quarter-credit short of graduation, and could’ve gone to summer school to take PE or health class to graduate no later than August ’86.

Back To The Future Photo Clip, May 7, 2009. Source: http://gilka.co.uk

What would’ve happened or not happened isn’t all that easy to figure out with any degree of certainty. But I can make a few educated guesses based on the kind of person I was twenty-five years ago. I hadn’t made any definitive decisions about what college to go to because my plans by April ’86 were for the fall of ’87, and not sooner. I had taken the AP US History exam that May, and all but knew that I’d earned a “5” and six college credits because of my score. The thought of graduating early had crossed my mind in the weeks after the exam.

The reality of life at 616, meanwhile, would’ve been harder to manage. With me out of school in ’86 instead of ’87, I suddenly would’ve found myself with more time on my hands for resentment and anger than I had before. Especially once my Technisort job came to an end at the beginning of August of that year. Sure, I would’ve filled my afternoons with watching or listening to Mets games from August to the World Series win on October 27th, and my fall/winter Sundays with Giants games as they marched to their first Super Bowl. But in between, I would’ve been looking for work, or would’ve found part-time work.

I know for sure that I would’ve spent even more time watching over my younger siblings, washing clothes, running to the grocery store, cooking meals, and so many other things that I ended up doing during my summers at home from my studies at the University of Pittsburgh. That would’ve made me resentful, given the lack of emotional support I had from my Mom.

I would’ve had to endure more weekend searches for my alcoholic father Jimme in order to have enough money to get away from 616 while waiting to start college in ’87. I probably would’ve seen a bit more of my idiot (ex) stepfather between September and November ’86 and March through May ’87, not an easy task considering I sometimes imagined myself stabbing him in the neck.

Or would I? If I know anything about space, time and history, if you change one decision, no matter how small, you change almost everything that comes afterward, even if some events on the surface look the same. I would’ve thought about taking some college courses at Westchester Community College, Pace University, perhaps even Fordham or one of the CUNY schools, like Hunter College. I still would’ve explored applying for schools outside of the NYC area, including the University of Pittsburgh. A couple of extra months at home would’ve made me more weary of being at 616 and in Mount Vernon than I actually was at the beginning of my senior year at MVHS.

Still, there was so much I would’ve missed learning my senior year. About the pitfalls of liking a girl whose only goal in life besides pleasing her parents was in pulling away from them by being cool (read Crush #2 and cruel, actually). All of the friendships and relationships that failed to endure the year. The difference between a great teacher like the late Harold Meltzer and someone in need of a career change like an Estelle Abel or a David Wolf. And that taking three AP courses in one year with teachers of varying abilities and with senioritis in full bloom was a terrible idea.

Those lessons wouldn’t have been learned for at least a year, and made my transition to college harder. Without those bitter lessons, I probably wouldn’t be a historian and a writer. For all I know, I probably would’ve ended up a bartender making the best daiquiris in Westchester County.