The last time I participated in one of these ice breaker activities though, I was upstaged by a guy, probably in his mid-30s, who said he was a Dolly Parton groupie and followed her all over the United States when she was on tour. I know I'm not supposed to judge, but by the looks of him I just didn't find his story too hard to believe. He wore huge platform shoes and complimented me on my glasses and invited me to come to his house on a Sunday morning so we could study together and get drunk on Mimosas. Although I thought he was a delightfully colorful and fun person, I was having a hard enough time passing statistics without trying to study in an alcohol induced buzz with Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5 in the background. Despite his repeated invitations via handwritten notes which contained large loopy letters, I never did join him in a study session. In retrospect, I sort of wish I would have.
Anyway, his Dolly Parton story trumped my story about becoming a frat boy.
Well, okay, I didn't actually become a frat boy. I just lived in the same house with them. My story seemed a little anemic compared to his. Not that we were supposed to compare. Still, chasing Dolly Parton around the country had a lot more pizzaz. But maybe not, in the end. Because for me, living in the fraternity house was about chasing something too. Only I wasn't chasing after a celebrity with giant hair and absurdly large breasts. I was chasing a dynamic young woman yearning to live life. Longing to be free.
I was chasing myself.
My frat boy story starts in the summer of my sophomore year of college. I needed a place to live and the cheapest place I could find was a fraternity house. Moving home for the summer was an option. But then, so was jumping off a bridge. Both having equal appeal, I opted for a totally different direction and ended up taking a room, not in a fancy fraternity house with a built in keg and gigantic Greek letters plastered on the side, but rather in the modest, unassuming Farm House Fraternity.
It was an agricultural college after all.
There were a few young men living in the fraternity house that summer and one other woman who stayed a week or two and left. It was just me and the guys then. As I recall it, the men were all very nice and considerate. Not entirely the cleanest bunch of guys I could have roomed with, maybe, but they were kind. I'm pretty sure I never went barefoot in the house.
I had my own space and I never felt unsafe. In fact, I felt safer there than at home. I was perhaps a tad out of place, but it was a time of life when I felt perpetually out of place, anyway, so I'm not sure it was that much different. As I look back on it, I realize that was the time when, rather than just surviving, I was learning to live.
Granted, moving into the Farm House Fraternity wasn't a huge adventure. Nor was it particularly exciting. And it certainly wasn't being a groupie. But it was the first time I had made a decision to walk away from the unhealthy environment I'd grown up in and in many ways it was where I began to feel free.
Freedom didn't happen overnight. It took many years and, like everyone, I'm not entirely free yet. But through the years that followed my frat boy summer, I learned to keep making decisions that were healthy for me. I learned to celebrate my own free spirit. I learned to laugh. I learned to find joy in doing something out of the ordinary. I learned to love color. And humor. And people who were different from me.
I learned to love life.
It was just one short summer. But it was a beginning. I didn't become close enough friends with any of the men to stay in contact. Now, years later those farm boys of summer are engaged in manly lives of their own somewhere and likely don't even remember that I lived there.
But I remember. Because becoming a frat boy changed my life. Much more than chasing Dolly Parton ever would have.
Brother D-Day! Brother Bluto!
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