I AM A ROCK, I AM AN ISLAND…

…NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

My two children accuse me at times of being too soft, too sentimental, too sensitive.  My standard answer is, “You’re right.  I’m a sensitive person.  Be careful with me.”  This wasn’t always true.  I used to be a rock.

My parents raised my sister and me to be independent thinkers, problem solvers, think-for-yourself kind of people.  This served me well at Arcadia High School.

In my junior year at Arcadia, I had felt honored and excited when invitations arrived in my first hour classroom singling out the “special ones” to join Delta – the Club of Special Ones.  A Delta Girl entered our classroom with envelopes in her hand, handed one to the teacher, and turned to walk out of the room.  All eyes in the room stayed glued on “the envelope.”  As the door closed behind the “special one”, the teacher looked to her hand and called my name.

I couldn’t wait for next year and the club meetings, to stay late and be one of the group, the Delta group.

My senior year arrived, and in September, I went to the first meeting. I grabbed one of the seats on the perimeter of the room and watched to see what would happen.  Today, I can’t remember anything of those meetings other than the feeling that I didn’t belong.  Some of the Delta girls who were friends of mine during my junior year had graduated, and as a senior, I felt isolated in a club of girls from the year below, my year, girls who were dating football stars and comparing clothes and dates.

Likewise, they didn’t seem to feel comfortable around me.  I didn’t see any sense in pressing it.  I was a rock.  After trying Delta for five meetings, I simply told President Donna I didn’t feel like continuing in the club.  She didn’t ask me to stay.  I never looked back.  I didn’t miss them, and they didn’t miss me.  I was a rock.

That experience told me I didn’t need to go early to college freshman orientation at Arizona State University in order to participate in Rush…sororities…sisters…and family.

What a week of frenzy–where all the campus sororities invited all the freshman women to 15-minute parties where you hurried to chat cleverly and quickly with a variety of “Delta” women so they would remember you when they sat with all the “Delta” sisters later in the evening, going over the lists of freshmen women who had come through the parties at their sorority house that day.

Their evening job would be to cross off the “dull” women.  Slowly but surely, party after party, day after day, until finally, on day number four,  they would issue their premium invitations to the select group of women who were invited to become college “Delta” girls.

My aunt Marla had belonged to a sorority when she was in college.  She had fond memories of it. In the quite days of summer before going to the university campus, talking with me about my plans for entering college, she asked me if I would be going to Rush. I tried to soften my distaste for sororities, even as she told me  about her best friends, her sorority friends.  Finally, I was pressed to explain my prejudices that were based on my few weeks of membership in Delta.  Aunt Marla accused me of being narrow minded.  So I showed her.

I went to Rush at the University.  Monday, with the list of sorority parties in hand, I made the rounds.  One day of triviality was enough.  On Tuesday, I dropped out, leaving me with a week to explore the campus.  I was a rock.  One of my best friends today was also a Rush dropout, another rock.

I had no reason to apologize to Aunt Marla.  The dominant memory of Rush forms one of my most vivid and worst memories of college.

But there were other girls, other dreams, and other hearts at play in that university introduction.  A dear, quiet Jewish girl had been sent to Rush by her mother to pledge to her mother’s Jewish sorority.  As happened with all ‘rushies,’ her party invitations decreased day by day as sororities crafted their final lists of invitees to pledge.

On the final day of Rush I found her in tears, alone in our room, wondering how she was ever going to tell her mother that she hadn’t pledged her Jewish sorority.  She had been crossed off everyone’s list.  She was alone, the rush girl that nobody had invited, even to her mother’s Jewish sorority, breaking an almost mandatory mother-daughter tradition.  She agonized.  What was she going to say to her Mother?

There was no way to console her, nothing to be said to take away the pain.  I cried inside for her and wished she were a rock, too.  Who needed them?  It was all silliness…unless you wanted to be part of the silliness.  And she did.  I hated Rush.

The rest of college suited me to a T.  Being independent and on my own as a college freshman was a high I have never since experienced.  My parents were wonderful to pay for me live in a dorm on campus, a few miles from the family home.  I asked them to let me stay full time on campus, not coming home on weekends, so that I could feel as if I had gone to an out-of-state college.  I would “fly” home in my powder-blue VW for Thanksgiving and Christmas, six miles away.  They respected my request to be a Rock.

Not everyone did.  I was shocked when several men friends trivialized my arrival at college by saying I was there simply to get my M-R-S degree.  ‘What kind of degree is that?’ I asked, sincerely wondering what field of study it came from.  ‘Mrs.’ they said.  ‘Get it?’  I did, and I was insulted.  Who needed men?  I didn’t.  I was a Rock.

America is a great place to be a Rock.  We can get lost in crowds, in cities, on computers.  We can demand our rights, our space, our distance.  But eventually, even rocks must melt.