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Chapters One Through Eighteen
Sitting at my computer, in a dormitory of a University where I am considered to be among the top of my class, is an interesting position from which to write the story of my life. Although I have always considered college �what you�re supposed to do after high school,� and my only pathway into a successful adult life, reflection on the matter has revealed a much greater significance. It took some serious thinking to realize for the first time that on at least one side of my family, I am the first to attend college at all, let alone as an honors student or with a scholarship. I come from a long line of blue-collar workers, and the fact that I am at West Virginia University at all is due to a massive interruption.
Personal accounts of growing up in McKeesport, PA include such memorable quips as �In our town, you didn�t ask where your friend�s father worked. You asked which part of the mill he worked in.� True enough, both of my grandfathers, various uncles, and my parents were at one time or another dependent on the steel mills. In 1982, U.S. Steel�s National Tube Works closed its doors for good, displacing both of my parents: when I was born in 1983, they were both collecting unemployment checks. I can only imagine how different my life might be now if the great expanse of furnaces along the Monongahela River were still in operation. Considering that my parents eventually completed their college educations and consequently encouraged me to do the same, I feel it safe to say that the events that have altered my life the most occurred before I was even alive.
As it was, I was born not to two steelworkers but to a housewife and a night-school accounting student. After wrestling between Crystal and Dawn, my creative parents decided to 'compromise' and somehow came up with Keri Elizabeth. This did nothing to deter my grandmother, who upon seeing my bad case of baby measles christened me �Rosiola� at once. Creativity apparently runs in my family. This nickname transformed into Rose, Rosebud, and various other forms, and I also answer to Keribear, and the occasional �Frieda� from my mother. My parents never gave me a brother or sister, but my extended family made that unnecessary: my mother has four siblings and my father seven, and they of course have all provided more than enough children and grandchildren to make gatherings interesting (especially considering that much like myself they all answer to three or four different names). Attending one of our family gatherings is not recommended for the faint of heart.
Aside from my crazy family, the biggest influence on my life in its earliest years was undoubtedly books. My mother tells me that she used to read her romance novels out loud to her stomach while pregnant, and although the quality of literature is somewhat dubious, I credit my love of reading to these beginnings. I read a bedtime story with my father every night I can remember, and one of my earliest memories involves me at age two, sitting on the carpet with my Mother Goose books and mom�s cassette recorder. I still listen to the tapes from time to time, of mom and I reciting nursery rhymes and the alphabet together. Probably because of the books, I loved school from the moment I entered kindergarten at St. Coleman�s Elementary School in Turtle Creek.
These grade school years were spent in relative ignorance of world events: I created my own world with Barbie dolls, Care Bears, and My Little Ponies. Occasional �duck and cover� drills in my school�s hallways were only an annoying distraction from the classes I loved so much. I thought little of them after I was dismissed at 2:30 to watch my favorite cartoons. My biggest fears stemmed from the sporadic interruption of Duck Tales by the loud beep of Emergency Broadcast System tests. My mother would explain them and comfort me; so the word �communism� was associated with bad men in a far-away place, and was only ushered into my mind by the red glow of that screen.
In second grade we were all concerned little patriots, wearing our yellow ribbons in support of our troops in Iraq. My school held a red, white, and blue assembly, and I can still remember singing �Bless the USA� with my classmates then dashing to our car. You see, we had to hurry home and watch the Pittsburgh Penguins win yet another game on their run to a second Stanley Cup. In my family, town, and school, this was of equal importance: the blackboards were hung with crayon-scrawled American flags and signs reading �Let�s Go Pens!� alike. I think when one�s mother attends NHL games while pregnant, and one witnesses nearly every home game from age three on, a love of hockey is inevitable. Mario Lemieux and the years of the Stanley cups sealed it for me.
We had to leave our season tickets and our relatives behind in 1991. My dad�s transfer to a job in Morgantown, West Virginia and our move to a new house in Fairmont left us somewhat fearful of �hillbilly� neighbors and a lack of civilization. (Popular sentiment dictated at the time, and my relatives in Pittsburgh assume still today, that we�d have to get used to our neighbors going shoeless.) This however was my father�s first opportunity to get ahead after being forced out of mill life, and in comparing my �two homes,� I realize my current bedroom closet is as big as my entire room in McKeesport, and that we really are much better off in the Mountain State. Along with our added funds came new luxuries, such as a swimming pool, our first new car (the �83 Ford had to go) and a computer, which I had seen previously only in school or in television show offices. Reader Rabbit and Math Blasters began to shift the majority of my after-school alone time from my shelves of Judy Blume and Roald Dahl to the computer screen. In 5th grade, my fingers became accustomed to the �home keys� on my keyboard, which would prove to serve me well just a few years down the road.
I never was big on pop music or MTV, which might explain my lack of popularity in my Catholic middle school class of 20 - when there is only one clique consisting of half of your classmates, things become difficult. I did love my teachers and even most of the schoolwork, since I had moved on from Ramona Quimby to a little Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte. Catholic school wasn�t all bad: the uniforms provided at least a little comfort, since there wasn�t much room for ridicule when your most-feared enemy was wearing the same maroon knee socks as yourself. I had a few very close friends and even managed to get my first �date� to the local roller rink (Fairmont isn�t exactly a Mecca of activity). I do have fond memories of my class as one tight group, watching the OJ Simpson verdict on the library�s television and getting our first experiences with the new and strange Windows 3.1 (what had happened to the green-screened Apples?). For the most part, however, I couldn�t wait to move out of the small group and into what I thought would be a bigger and better place.
I did so in 1997, when I marched (quite literally, with my flute and patent leather Dinkles) into Fairmont Senior High. When I began playing in 7th grade, I had thought marching band a way to become closer with my neighborhood friends, who all played clarinets. My freshman year was actually spent cowering in the band room from the hundreds of people I didn�t know. Then I found that keyboarding skills were indeed essential to life - the popular use of 56k modems brought Internet connections into all of our homes in rapid succession.
The suave proclamation of �You�ve Got Mail!� invaded my Dad�s home office with America Online: it was sometime around that year that Dad gave up the pretense of having his own office and we began referring to the room with the computer as our den, instead. Afternoons were no longer spent on the phone in the conventional sense, but rather typing to my friends through instant messages. Web sites about bands such as Matchbox Twenty (whose CDs I could finally own, now that our ancient record and tape player had finally given up and died) brought me up to date on all the pop culture I had been missing for the past few years. Internet anonymity allowed me to explore and learn as I chose, and ask whatever questions I liked regarding whatever topic. It was responsible in many ways for building my confidence and helping me make friends.
The Internet and the marching band were my two social realms for my four high school years. I met some of my closest friends and my two steady boyfriends during my four-year tenure in the Polar Bear Band. I also discovered, after years of just getting through my music, that practice does make perfect, and music consumed nearly all of my time during my final two years at FSHS. The time not spent on scales and etudes was spent mostly at a bookstore, which made most of its business selling coffee. Fairmont�s infamous roller rink having been shut down, however, there was not much else for the young people in our town to do, and we didn�t enjoy spending our social time reading.
The BNB (as we affectionately called it) was basically out of the book trade by its second month of operation, when we and some local musicians began invading it almost every night to play, talk, and otherwise disrupt anyone attempting to read. We spent our nights listening to covers of folk music, basking in the glow of coffee milkshakes and tie-dyed tee shirts. Our caf� hideaway was a wonderful escape from sensational news and school violence hotlines. Who cared if the rest of America worshipped Adidas, hip-hop, and boy bands? We had Birkenstocks on our feet and Phish, The Grateful Dead, and Steve Miller in our CD cases and throats.
The other major occupation of my senior year was my exhaustive hunt for an appropriate place to continue my education. My college search was in no small part influenced by WVU�s reputation as a party school - I wanted to avoid it at all costs. �Costs,� however, proved to be very instrumental in my final decision, since my favorite private, out-of-state institutions didn�t exactly appeal to my father�s financial senses. In April of my senior year the award of a Bucklew Scholarship (and, possibly, the purchase of a new car as a result of surplus college funds) suddenly sparked in me an intense and unforeseen case of Mountaineer Mania.
After carting many of my favorite possessions and what seems like half of my bedroom to Dadisman Hall, I began learning the ropes of being a University student, including finding my way around the sprawling campus. Becoming a permanent pedestrian changes one�s outlook, and I considered mastering the PRT system no small accomplishment. One sniffly Tuesday morning, I proudly made my way from a three-hour chemistry lab to the student health services center. I was sitting in the waiting room listening to radio reports of a downed plane in Pennsylvania and thinking it was too bad, when someone switched the radio off in favor of the television. I can�t recall what exactly I exclaimed, only that the response from the receptionist was �Oh, honey, didn�t you know?�
My older relatives can tell you exactly what they were doing at the moment of the news of Pearl Harbor, or the assassination of John Kennedy; and my generation will undoubtedly be sharing these detailed stories of September Eleventh. Unlike the Gulf war, the Simpson trial, or the Clinton impeachment, which took a backseat to the people and other events in my life, 9/11 was immediate and frightening. No, perhaps the draft wasn�t reinstated as many of us feared, and no, the anthrax attacks never led to mass waves of biological warfare. And though security measures and states of alert eventually returned to normal, something monumental had happened to my generation.
My friends and I were for the first time experiencing a threat to our own well being from a foreign enemy. This realization of vulnerability separated us, in my eyes, into two categories. There were some who managed to shrug the event off, concerning themselves only with the myriad of jokes and Internet sites defiling Osama Bin Laden and ignoring the changes in life around them. The remainder of us, however, came to the realization that we are indeed no longer children, but young adults. If there were a job to be done in the face of our newly aggressive enemy, men and women of my age would be among the first called upon to complete it. We found ourselves feeling unprepared, but somehow ready to exceed even our own expectations.
So although everyday life remains virtually the same after these attacks, my outlook on that life had been dramatically changed. How entirely appropriate it was that America was attacked only a few months before my 18th birthday, for if nothing else the disaster served to make me an adult in many ways. This year has been wonderful, heartening, and almost inspirational in the opportunities it has provided, and shouldn't be overlooked by any means. But I consider it a part of my adult life, and September 11th the day this new portion of life began. Therefore, closing my story with the ramifications of that day seems appropriate, because this has been the story of my childhood. The adult chapters have yet to be lived.
keri delsignore, 2002
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