Boxed In or Not?

Theme Thursday - Box
"What will the neighbors think?"  That's what I often heard from my mom and dad when I was young and impressionable. It seems it was lots about appearances, making sure that our family looked "normal".  And we were normal, meaning we were as dysfunctional as everyone else; but no one was owning up to anything.

Thinking outside the box, only a popular phrase much later on, was a revelation when I experienced it for the first time. In fact, I slipped outside the box before I even knew what that meant. I was 18 and newly arrived as a freshman in Berkeley, away from home for the first time, unless you count my one very homesick adventure at a depressing church camp.

I arrived in all my innocence and was amazed at what I observed. For the few months, I walked around campus decked out in my Sally Sorority denim skirt, madras shirt, and scuffed loafers, wearing the startled facial expression of a deer caught in the proverbial head lights. In fact, I was so engrossed in what was happening around me, I didn't have much energy left over to put into my studies...an oops situation that was sadly reflected in my first semester's slumping GPA.

Balance ensued eventually, and I learned to hit the books while sampling the varied experiences that Cal had to offer: toga parties, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, keggers, Malcolm X, the Smothers Brothers, Ronald Reagan, the Big Game, a worldly and sophisticated roommate from New York, JFK at Charter Day, Harry Belafonte, and on and on. Then came the Free Speech Movement and, like witnessing  a UFO landing, I was wide-eyed with incredulity. Question authority? Take over the administration building? Holler and picket? Who did these things? Well, a lot of people, apparently. I'd never seen anything like it.

By the time I finished my four year adventure, I was not the same person. The safety and the narrowness of the box in which I was raised will always be a part of me, and there were many useful lessons learned growing up in Santa Rosa; I am not totally knocking it. In fact, I am grateful for it. However, I am so thankful that my parents, as conservative as they were, encouraged and allowed me to try my wings when I was still, as my father always told me, "wet behind the ears". It was a profound and beyond-the-text-book-experience that shaped, in so many ways, who I am today.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.