Community College: Overcoming the Odds
Mamacita says: The community college is one of the best things that ever happened to higher education. Go ahead – turn up your nose and be all snobby about it – but it’s true and you know it.
So many of my students are overcoming tremendous odds to be in school right now. They’ve got families and mortgages and spouses/partners, some of whom disapprove of the whole “college” thing; they’ve got needy parents and in-laws and overdue bills and a sad lack of daycare options. On top of it all, most of my students have no job right now, and the defunct factories and Workforce are both being poopy about promises they’d previously made concerning tuition and books and actually coming through with things because education is the key to the future and you can count on us to back you up.
And yet, most of them show up, day after day or night after night, homework done, papers 
written, knowing exactly which page we’re on and ready to begin again.
The majority of my students are fine, hardworking, upstanding people who genuinely want to better themselves: not just so they might get a better job at some future time, but also just so they’ll be, well, BETTER.
Sure, there are some clunkers. In any group there will always be losers. But the vast majority of my students this semester are prime. In their prime, and prime.
I love a mixed-age group in an academic setting. The young have so much to offer the older, especially older students who are not responsible for raising them. The older students have so much to offer the younger students, especially since (see above). I firmly believe that all young people need older people to be mentors, people who are not related and who demonstrate love and friendship and genuine liking that are not required by blood. In a community college classroom, there is a healthy mix of ethnicity, age, sex/gender, and you name it – it’s sitting there, notebook ready, pen in hand. Usually also with cell phone silenced but turned on, because adult students have responsibilities beyond that classroom, a fact which many instructors and institutions choose not to acknowledge.
There is no shame in working a low-end, minimum-wage service 
sector job – don’t misunderstand me. NO SHAME in that. But I do hope my students, many of whom are working such jobs, understand that this college degree, even more than many four-year university degrees, will open the door to better jobs.
Yes, that’s what I said. Ofttimes, a community college degree will open more doors than a fancy university degree will open.
Community college degrees represent real life. They represent practical, actual knowledge that the world not only needs; it requires. I am not referring only to the many awesome and necessary skills that the world needs, truly NEEDS, such as air conditioning/heating/ the many vocational degrees that represent real abilities, nursing, etc; the community college offers many of the same academic classes that the university offers. Students can take all kinds of math, from algebra all the way up to finite and calculus, and every math in between. Students can get almost all of their English credits at the community college, with many of the same professors they would have at the expensive university. Psychology, sociology, philosophy, most of the sciences. . . . the community college is a COLLEGE. And we will gladly welcome students the university rejects, knowing that most of such students just needed a helping hand to get them well on their way to the same and often higher standards met as the student who had the money to go to university.
I am not in any way putting down university; that’s where I got all my degrees and I loved it. But after twelve years as a professor in the community college, I have come to understand that THIS is where it’s at. This is where the groove thang resides.
Look closely and analytically and lovingly at your child. Higher education is a requirement for almost every job that pays enough for basic survival, but there is more than one kind of higher education. Explore them with your child. Check out all of the possibilities and opportunities. I highly recommend a year or two at the community college; those credits will transfer to the university. Community college costs so much less than university; those savings will also transfer! Some students need a little time to learn without stress. Some students have been out of school for so long that they, too, need some time to get back in the learning mode.
In a community college classroom, students will come from all kinds of backgrounds. There will be a mix of ages from 17 to 90. There will be all kinds of lifestyles, all sorts of ethnicities, all manner of appearances. The community college classroom is a rainbow of color, of wonderful everything, of wonderfulness in general.
The community college is one of the best things that has ever happened to education. I will fight you on this one. I will win.
I will win, because it is true. It is wonderful, and it is true.
I Never Knew My Grandmother
Mamacita says: I never knew my grandmother.
Oh, I knew the woman who bore my mother and my aunt and my uncles, but I never knew the woman she really was. I only knew the woman she became after the stroke.
Before the stroke, Ruth Grogan was a vibrant, vital, witty, highly intelligent woman who laughed, read, told stories, married (she actually HAD to get married, as they called it back then when a woman had sex before marriage and got knocked up) had four children, cooked, sewed, maintained a home, drove a car, and was just generally a fairly typical, very cool woman of her time. My grandfather worked for the railroad and was gone all week; he came home on weekends, bringing his laundry. All the rest of the time, my grandmother did it all: cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, etc. And she did it by herself.
Dora Ruth Grogan as a young woman
The fact that she had a driver’s license was pretty cool – not many women drove a car back then. Ruth Grogan was an innovator. She saw no reason she couldn’t do something she wanted to do just because she was a woman. She just did it.
Ruth Grogan and friend: flappers
My grandmother was the youngest of four daughters. Her mother died when Ruth was three years old, and her father let relatives raise her and her five-year-old sister, while he kept the two older sisters with him. Pop, as my mother called him, never remarried. On his deathbed, he talked about his wife. Love never dies.
The Hilton sisters: Ruth, Edna, Mabel, and Mary
So Ruth was raised without a mother. Her aunt was kind to her, but she wasn’t Ruth’s mother. The lack of a role model didn’t prevent Ruth from being a good mother herself; some things are instinctive.
Edward and Ruth Grogan, and their sons James and Larry
Ruth Grogan with her two daughters, Reva and Phyllis
After the stroke, Ruth was a shell of herself. She was trapped inside her head. We will never know if the woman she really was, was still there somewhere, because the woman she became, after the stroke, was NOT Ruth.
Her speech was backwards and ridiculous. My cousin Carol and I, once we got old enough to pretty much take care of ourselves, used to stay all night with her every weekend we were able. Every morning, Mamaw woke us up by standing at the foot of the stairs and calling up to us “Carol, Janie, breakfast what?” We would reply, “Bacon, Mamaw.” When we went downstairs to the kitchen, we would find bacon. Just bacon.
She listened to the radio avidly and whenever she heard a familiar name she would say “Your daddy him knowed.” (referring to our grandfather, who had been killed a few years previously.) (That’s another very interesting story.) Mahalia Jackson’s singing made her laugh hysterically – Mahalia sang the sign-off song on Channel 4 after Nightmare Theater, and Carol and I looked forward to the singing because we loved to see Mamaw laugh like that. Neither of us was allowed to watch Nightmare Theater at home because it was scary, but at Mamaw’s house we made our own rules. Mamaw stayed up with us and did not go to bed herself until we did. She loved to hear us talk and laugh, and once in a while she would chime in with a comment that probably made sense to her but was often just out of the blue.
Sammy Terry, played by Robert Carter, hosted Nightmare Theater
She could cook a little, read a little, clean the house a little, etc. But none of her grandchildren ever knew the woman she really was. When Carol and I were at her house, she fixed us each a hamburger every day for lunch, and Carol and I made french fries and macaroni and cheese. When we were at Mamaw’s house, we did what we wanted to do and we ate what we wanted to eat and we went wherever we wanted to go. It was a kind of freedom I’d never dreamed of having – away from my younger siblings and in a neighborhood not my own. I still dream about it.
Dora Ruth Hilton Grogan
Mamaw’s child-raising days were over, and she never asked us where we were going or where we’d been. We rode our bicycles all over town, bought comic books and SweeTarts, made runny fudge which we dyed green just to experiment a little and because we could, played games, spray-painted everything we could reach, dared each other to go into the huge dark creepy closets and basements, and just generally had fun and freedom and absolute control over our lives. What kid could ask for more?
SweeTarts, in the foil package
As Mamaw got older, it became more difficult for her to live alone. She came to live with my parents for a while; then she and her son, my Uncle Larry, shared an apartment for just a little while. It soon became obvious that she needed a safe environment with people to care for her needs 24/7. Mom tried again to take care of her, but her needs had moved beyond a single person’s ability. She entered a nursing home, where she kept ’em all jumping with her antics. Ruth Grogan was a character, and nobody who knew her was ever able to forget it. Give her a quarter, and she was on the pay phone calling somebody, and she could talk, in her funny stilted way, for hours if nobody stopped her. She loved to embroider, and I think all of her granddaughters have pillowcases that she embroidered.
Mamaw in the apartment, doing her embroidery
When she died, my first thought was, now she can be her real self again. All those years of being trapped inside her head, of the stilted speech, the awkward life, and now she’s herself again.
I wish I had known Ruth Grogan when she was her true self. Everyone who did know her says she was awesome. When I look at my mother, I have no trouble at all believing that.
Carol and I loved those weekends at Mamaw’s house. We loved the freedom. We loved “playing on the phone.” (Is your refrigerator running?) We loved the french fries and the macaroni and cheese and the fudge. We loved going to Crowder’s Drugstore every half hour to buy candy and comic books. We loved the playground equipment behind Stalker School. We loved the squeaky porch swing. We loved the garish wallpaper and the old sheets with laundry detergent powder in the creases. We loved sitting on the couch watching Nightmare Theater, with our feet up so the monsters under the couch couldn’t grab us and drag us under to devour us or take us to another dimension. We loved sleeping upstairs in the big bed, so blisteringly hot that even the ancient fan couldn’t help us – we were afraid to turn it on anyway because it was so old we were afraid the house would catch fire. We loved looking at my uncle’s, um, “magazines.” We loved being scared in that house; it was a safe scared and we knew it even while we squealed and pretended to be traumatized. I loved riding my bike TO Mamaw’s house; it was a route mommies of today would never in a million years allow their fragile snowflakes to make: under the train trestle, up and down really steep hills. . . .
I’m glad my kids got to meet her, even for a little while.
Mamaw Grogan and baby Andy
I’ve been thinking about my grandmother quite often, lately. I really wish I’d known her, the real grandmother, the actual person who had been so alive and real and herself.
With Ruth Grogan, it’s always before the stroke and after the stroke. I only knew her after the stroke.
But she was still pretty cool. “Carol, Janie, breakfast what?” “Your daddy him knowed.”
Another piece of my childhood, shared with all of you.
Put It On the Bill, Please
Mamacita says: We shopped by putting it on the bill. Grocery shopping with money? I don’t understand. Didn’t everybody just put it on the bill?
I didn’t know how to shop for groceries until I was well into my twenties. What do you think about that one?
We didn’t NEED no stinkin’ baby seat in our shopping cart. The baby sat with the milk and the baby LIKED IT.
We lived just a few blocks from a small local grocery store/hamburger joint. There were four of us kids. Our mom didn’t shop for the week; she shopped for the meal. With four kids, she never had to run out of anything because there was always a kid handy to send to “the store” for whatever it was she needed. Often, a kid carrying a bottle of ketchup in a brown paper bag from the store would meet a sibling on her/his way TO the store for bread. One of us kids went to the store at least once a day for just a few things, or maybe even just one. We never took money; we put it on the bill. Every week, my parents would go to the store themselves and settle up.
Put it on the bill, please.
Mom said once that after all her kids were grown and gone, she had a hard time shopping for groceries, herself. She had to remember that SHE had to go to the store to get it; there were no more little kids to send, six times a day. 🙂 Mom learned how to shop for a week, too. We’re never too old.
I put a couple of Superman comic books on the bill once. ONCE. My younger siblings used to put watermelon sticks on the bill and nobody ever took THEIR hide off.
The hamburger joint connected to the store was like something out of a little kid’s dream. You could get a hamburger, fries, and small coke, all for thirty cents, with sliced dill pickles in a little white paper cup. Dad always got a chocolate nut sundae and gave us each a bite. No restaurant has ever put enough mustard on a hamburger for me, so, like Dad, I would take my hamburger in hand and walk back behind the lunch counter to where the condiments (shut up, bad spellers!) were kept and load more cheap yellow goodness onto the bun. Then I’d take mine back to the booth, get Dad’s, and do the same for him. That hamburger place was heavenly, that’s all there was to it. As a family, we used to walk there, usually with a younger sibling in a stroller, and partake of hamburger bliss.
At most lunch counters back then, the dime coke was almost too big to finish. We usually ordered the nickel coke.
The dime coke was too big, but the nickel coke was juuuuust right.
In the evening, or on Saturdays, the teenagers would fill up the hamburger joint and play music on the jukebox. I thought they were all adults and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to sing along to “Sugar Shack.”
When I got married, we rented a tiny house way out in the country. We were buried in snow and ice, and I had to learn how to really shop for groceries, a week’s worth at a time, or even more. It took a while, but I finally caught on. There were no little brothers or sisters to send in my place, and we didn’t live in town so nobody could walk or ride a bike to the store for a few forgotten items. We were literally buried in snow, so we had to shop carefully in case even more snow fell; often, we were actually trapped in our own house. Nobody could go anywhere. I had to learn to make lists and add to them whenever I ran out of something. No more random runs (and I do mean runs) to the store. Shopping for groceries was now a serious thing.
If you’ve seen me lately, you’ll know that stocking up on food is no longer a problem. Paying for it, maybe, but making sure there’s some on hand, no.
I dream sometimes about those nickel cokes and that wonderful grocery store and that absolutely awesome hamburger joint, but I always wake up old. It’s a bit of a bummer.
