It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [126]
This time I took my GED and commendation from the governor with me when I went to the community college—I got into Seattle Central right away. Then I had to take placement tests. I scored low in math. I just couldn’t remember anything. The classes themselves interested me—even the math, in part because it was such a challenge.
At the end of the fall semester, I returned to Seattle U with my community college transcript in hand. I had straight A’s—Mom would have been proud, and I wished I could have shown her the transcript before I took it to the admissions office.
“That’s great,” I was told at Seattle University. “Now we want you to take this list of classes and get all A’s.”
Come on!
I ended up spending an entire academic year at community college. Throughout that year, there were indicators that let me know my mom was still around. One time, two-and-a-half-year-old Grace turned to look at me and Susan and we both froze—we were looking at mom’s crinkled-up seventy-six-year-old face, just looking at us and smiling. It stayed there for a few seconds. I guess such a strong connection based on love and all-encompassing trust doesn’t disappear overnight.
Early the next summer, in 2000, after submitting another slate of A’s from Central, I received a letter from Seattle University.
Dear Mr. McKagan,
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for admission to the class of 2004 at Albers School of Business and Economics.
That same summer, on July 14, 2000, Susan gave birth to our second daughter, Mae. She was a big, round Buddha baby, but Susan’s labor was much shorter and easier than it had been with Grace. And for her part, Grace took an instant liking to Mae and doted on her little sister.
For a middle name, we gave her Marie, after my mom.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
When my first semester of classes at Seattle University kicked off in the fall of 2000, I quickly realized the year at community college hadn’t helped me much as far as studying was concerned. The classroom situation was different, too. At Seattle U, the students knew they were there for the next four years. This was it. They weren’t just trying things out; they would be there, seeing one another, every day, for years. I had the same basic plan in mind, but I went home to a family every night and was closer in age to the professors than to my fellow undergrads.
Still, the kids were pretty respectful—they could see I was serious about it. They could see I wanted to learn. Early on, a few classmates brought in their copies of Appetite for me to sign, but that stopped as soon as they saw I really was just another student—one taking notes so voluminous they could fill a dumpster. I was up on campus all the time and got to know some of the kids in my classes. They were so smart. About half were from elite schools in and around Seattle, and the rest were academic studs from farther afield, including a good number of international students. It seemed everyone had taken AP classes or college-level courses while still in high school.
Learning to study was the key. At first, I probably spent eight hours studying what these whiz kids could cover in an hour. After a while I began to be able to filter better—I wasn’t trying to skate by, I just got better at picking out the important stuff. Susan and Dave Dederer taught me how to write, editing me—“hey, what about moving this part up to here?”—and fine-tuning my use of hyphens, semicolons, and other grammatical minutiae. Of course, by then I was reading a ton, too, so writing was somewhat intuitive once I got rolling.
Now that Susan and I had kids and lived in Seattle, she pushed me to start calling my dad. Susan had a good relationship with both of her parents even though they, too, were divorced.