The Things Between Us by Lee Montgomery

Author:Lee Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

It was a bit of a miracle that I graduated from college since I had spent most of my college years on the West Coast, but such is the way of Antioch, where students study on campus for a few months and then take off to work. After six months at Antioch, I left for California where I stayed a year. My first job was classic Antioch. I was an assistant to a onetime scientologist now turned sociologist/hypnotist, who hypnotized fat people on how not to be fat. He paid me in pot. A year later, after working for a ceramicist in Mill Valley and a few veterinarians in San Francisco, I returned to Antioch for a year straight, only to take off again. And so it went. Back and forth. My last jaunt had been to Portland, Oregon, where I worked full-time for a year as a research assistant at the Oregon Health Science Center and took biochemistry courses at the state university.

I had taken a leave of absence from my job to return to Antioch for a term to finish my degree. Following graduation, I was planning to return to my job in Oregon and start preparing for medical school. Everyone was pleased. I seemed to be smart and responsible.

My only problem was I didn’t want to study science. Not really. I did it because I thought it would please my Dad. Though I had given up drugs when I was eighteen, I was too confused emotionally to even begin to know who I was, so the easiest thing was to pretend to be someone else. For the five years of my college career, as I wandered the continent taking advanced placement science classes here and there, trying to be serious and scientific, I called my father repeatedly and begged for his permission to forget the whole thing.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Look, I am not going to send you to school to weave baskets.”

“But, Dad, I hate physics. I don’t get it.”

“Study,” he said.

“I want to go to Mexico,” I said. “I want to learn Spanish.”

“What you need to do is finish your degree and get yourself a job.”

“But, Dad,” I said. “I want to make movies.”

“You heard me.”

So, I finished my degree. On a beautiful summer day, my father sat in an audience of a few hundred people in the middle of nowhere Ohio. Antioch is not known for tradition, pomp, or formality of any kind, but chairs were assembled quaintly on the lawn under enormous oak trees. The stage was set, the podium was up, and after a few wonderful speakers (whose names neither Tom nor I can remember) the graduates’names were called. After moving through the reception line on the makeshift stage and receiving my diploma from the president, instead of following the others off the stage, I stopped to search out my father’s location in the audience. Finding him I broke off from the crowd and walked down the aisle.

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