Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2003 The al test in a series of small things Colin T. Rafferty Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Nonfiction Commons Recommended Citation Rafferty, Colin T., "The al test in a series of small things" (2003). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 200. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/200 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The latest in a series of small things by Colin Thomas Rafferty A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Creative Writing) Program of Study Committee: Sheryl St. Germain (Major Professor) Sidner Larson Teresa Paschke Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2003 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of Colin Thomas Rafferty has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Signature redacted for privacy Signature redacted for privacy - Signature redacted for privacy Major Professor Signature redacted for privacy or the MaJor Program lll Table of Contents Acknowledgements IV Introduction 1 Excused Absence 5 I Was a Teenage Trivia King 21 The Lord King of Suburbia 39 The Middle Oldest Child 54 The Bottom & How I Got There 67 The Mind of Love & Worry 81 Ariel & the Crow 93 The Point 101 Waiting for It 114 IV Acknowledgements My debts are many, and most of them carry interest. I am forever grateful to my parents, who put books in my hands at an early age, thus developing a lifelong love of reading that still gets me in trouble to this day, especially when I'm reading the side of a cereal box instead ofholding a conversation with someone. I'm also very thankful for my thesis committee, Sidner Larson, Teresa Paschke, and especially Sheryl St. Germain, for guiding this work along its various pathways. Sheryl gets extra points for being part of the Creative Writing Program at Iowa State University, who traded me one desk job for another, the difference being that I loved the new job. Other people who saved me from a life of Casual Fridays are Evelina Galang, Stephen Pett, Debra Marquart, and Mary Swander. Thank you, thank you, thank you. My friends and colleagues in the program have been the best part of this, and I have my final, deepest thanks for those that read drafts of these essays, willingly or not: Jennifer Johnson, James Austin, Dan Pinkerton, Ayana Rhodes, Joan Stewart, Anne Owen, Kim Rogers, and Molly Rose. Your insight saved me a thousand times. v You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily. --fortune cookie, 1999 1 Introduction Once, while we moved from Colorado to Kansas, on those stretches ofl-70 in western Kansas that go on forever, my father noticed my downcast mood. He turned down the radio and tapped me on the arm. "H;ey," he said. "Let's see if we can get this thing up to one hundred." His foot pressed the gas pedal of the family's Honda down to the floor, and the car picked up speed, the needle steadily crawling higher and higher, inching towards the 100 mark. I pressed my hand to the window and looked out, the flatness blurring into indistinct lines and colors, the homes we were going to and leaving losing their sharpness for just a few minutes, until finally, both ofus laughing over the car's shaking, my father eased off the pedal, and we dropped back down to the speed limit, back to reality of the fields around us. Long distance shaped my childhood. For just over twenty-five years, my father worked for the company that eventually, through a number of mergers and acquisitions, became Sprint, and as long distance rates steadily dropped through the 70s and 80s, we moved, continuously, at the company's behest, across America, circling around Kansas City, the company's home base and the city where I was born. By the time I was twelve, I'd lived in one of the country's most conservative towns (Warsaw, Indiana) and one of its most liberal (Boulder, Colorado). I'd watched our houses and neighbors steadily change with the view from my bedroom window. I'd started and stopped three different musical instruments because the new school didn't offer a music program, or we couldn't find a piano teacher, or the money just wasn't there after yet another payment to a shipping company. I'd stood under the teacher's hand in front of another new class and heard myself welcomed to another 2 new school, another thirty-some friends to make and lose by this time next year. And I'd envied my friends and relatives whose addresses never changed, who always lived in the same house, in the same room, with the same friends, their whole childhoods. Just as the previous generation had produced the mobile child called the army brat, I was the creation of a growing business culture: the corporate nomad. Indirectly, boardrooms and stockholders determined the other children I played with, the schools I attended, and the fields and summers I remember as my vacations. Who needed God when you had William T. Esrey, CEO of Sprint and my own fate? I had met army brats; they seemed hardened, tougher, products of a system devoted to fighting and defense. They guarded themselves, covered up in a blanket of punches and recklessness. They were the ones who built ramps out of plywood and bent nails and sailed off them on their bikes, invariably crashing into the pavement, only to jump up, bleeding and yelling "Dude! You've got to try this!" But the other corporate children I met were, like myself, quiet and withdrawn. 'We didn't have the nobility of defending the country to justify our constant packing and unpacking; we understood that our wanderings were the result of the pursuit of the bottom line. We had no more reason than profits that pushed us across the country, like pieces on a chessboard wielded by grandmasters in power ties and suspenders, and when my father, in my final year of high school, was finally laid off, I realized that he had never been in control, that he had been just as reluctant to take the family to another town as I had been to go there. It was out of his hands. These essays chronicle my attempt to join, discover, and create community both as a child and as an adult. In my youth, I sought belonging in a number of places, from the 3 Catholic Church to Hollywood game shows, from a parochial school classroom to a firetrap punk rock club. And each time, I felt close to belonging to something bigger than myself, only to see it broken up for a multitude of reasons, sometimes of my own doing. As an adult, I threw myself feverishly into my romantic relationships, believing that I might find in a community of two the stability that larger groups lacked. And when those relationships fell apart, I found myself more alone that I had ever imagined I might. When I found myself an adult, and able to put myself in one place if I so desired, I ended up moving more frequently, from time zone to time zone, from Midwest to Pacific Northwest and back again. Rootlessness, rather than harming me permanently, forged my identity, made me more reliant on myself, more willing to adapt to any situation, more eager to learn about the land I call home for the time I'm there. In the summer of 2001, I flew down to Sacramento, California for four days for a fencing tournament. As a friend and I walked the streets near our hotel, a couple stopped me, asking if 1 knew the location of a restaurant. This happens to me with an alarming frequency, on vacations and at home, and I've come to accept this as one of the signs that I've accepted my rootlessness--even embraced it, especially since I knew where the restaurant they wanted was. What I hope to accomplish with these essays is to suggest a direction for those who find themselves in the same situation, to prove that a person can come out of that culture and not find themselves trapped within it, to show how home and family and community are all adaptable and changeable things, capable of surviving any stock drop, expansion period, or round of downsizings, capable of being the green shoot asserting its existence on the broad stretch of concrete. 4 In the first essays, I recount my own childhood, showing how I reacted to that constant newness, of repeatedly leaving and arriving, and of how I survived through an unlikely duo of humor and trivia. From that background, I explore my own adult relationships in later essays. Movement is a constant theme within these essays, whether the movement of a job transfer, the movement of a fencer on the strip, or the movement of a tornado across the plains, and I have tried to bring a sense of restlessness, of constant motion, to these essays. What I have lived through is nothing special, but I write about it precisely because of its commonality.