Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but, until a month or so ago, I'd never heard of a "trunk party."

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

The weather has promised that it would not cooperate with plans those responsible for my granddaughter’s send-off have made. The heavens are growling and flashing angry looks so that I’ve situated an oil lamp, nothing like the ones we filled with “co’loil” when I was a kid, when night approached, storm or no storm. Yet we shall lay our bodies down, and rise the next day and, hopefully, greet friends and relatives at Lake Etta.

As I think about this send-off, I cannot but help recall the contrast between this girl and the girl two generations removed that she knows as grandma. I’ve spent some time sharing with her how different life was over 50 years ago, something I think should be a part of our offspring’s pool of knowledge. It’s important to look at the ground one’s covered to calculate the path ahead. It’s kinda like managing your bank account: If you keep up with your balance, you can deposit and withdraw more responsibly.

Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but, until a month or so ago, I’d never heard of a “trunk party.” It sounded pretty weird – stupid, to be honest. Celebrate a trunk? In a trunk? It made no sense to me, and when I heard the term, I just wrinkled my forehead, stretched my mouth down and ugly, and looked over my glasses with utter disdain, while everything inside me declared it “stupid!”

Reading my face, the “younger’ons,” with proper superiority, explained, “It’s a send-off, Grandma” – this part as if speaking to a 4-year-old – “where people bring stuff for your dorm.” The “smart gang” went on to list “necessities,” like sheets, blankets, house-shoes, robes…

By this time, if you know me, I had “that look,” the look that said, “Puhleeze…” This sounded like a wedding shower! What the umph (equivalent to heck) does a kid need with all that? Mine had sheets, pillowcases, blankets, robes… You name it; they had it! Heck, they had their own rooms! It’s not like twin sheets in their Gary bedrooms wouldn’t fit twin beds in a dorm!

I have a name for that: Scam! It’s “Go fund me” with “stuff” as checks! It’s passing around the collection plate three times during worship! It’s going to a different corner on different days with the same milk jug! These – to use my mother’s terminology – nineteen hundred kids (Nobody dared argue with her that she, too, was born in the 1900s) have not a clue to what “sending a kid off to college” means! They were indeed about to learn. I went back into my past…

When I graduated from high school, I packed my “stuff” into a blue “su-case,” a 3-piece one with a “train case” with a mirror in top (I still have it) that my stepfather bought at the jewelry store on 8th Avenue in Cairo, IL, for my graduation. That was all I carried, except for what little money relatives had pressed into my palm.

I don’t remember how I got to Carbondale, about 50 miles away, but when I got there, there were sheets on the bed, and there were already dark roommates in my bed, some, being a country girl, I’d never seen before: Roaches!

I, like others who wore my skin, came for school, to learn, not to be stylish. We didn’t need matching bed clothes – all sheets, as far as we knew, were white… I didn’t see a single new robe…

I looked around to meet their eyes, to make sure they understood that education is about learning… growing…becoming...

They were gone!

Story Posted:07/22/2017