I first came to Ames, Iowa for a summer internship in May of 1995 on a scholarship for women engineers. My life, as usual, didn’t follow the normal path, and I ended up graduating 2000 miles away at a different university with a degree in English. I’ve been back twice, but never for very long, and always in the winter.
I loved Ames when I first arrived; I loved it madly and I fell in love just as madly with a young Psych major shortly after I arrived. My love for the city began to abate six weeks later; the Psych major broke things off with me and messed me up the way only a Psych major can. I comforted myself the last month of my stay here by having an affair with a married man, one of the biggest regrets of my entire life so far, and I ran screaming for the plane in August, just three months after my arrival. I couldn’t wait to get out of here.
I suppose I shouldn’t talk about this online. I mean, my mother-in-law reads this blog, after all. But those were hard years for me — years when I realized that half my guy “friends” actually had crushes on me, years when I realized that I wasn’t superman or wonder woman or anything even close. Years when I worked myself the way only a very young, very desperate woman can work herself, until I found myself in the hospital with mono and later chronic fatigue. So I approach Ames hesitantly, like a deer approaches the lovely meadow where she had been shot and wounded and only just escaped.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I left some absolutely magnificent friends behind here. These are friends that have seen me through my desperate college years, kept in touch while I wandered around overseas and who still manage to remember my birthday, Marti’s birthday, the kids’ birthdays, AND our anniversary. I can’t compete with that kind of friendship. So, this year we got in our car and drove 1500 miles to see them. It was the least we could do.
The last time I passed through here was in 2001, shortly after Marti and I were married. We were on our way to Washington, D.C. to start our new life together, and we stopped in Ames merely to stop, really. I wanted to see my friends, and it was a semi-convenient place to stop. We got here in the dark and left the next morning, so it wasn’t a stay, really.
This time we are here for 4 days and nights. Not a long time, but long enough to dredge up memories of places I’ve been (Cafe Beaudelaire!) and people I’ve seen. Somewhat surprisingly, the pain is gone. It has been 12 years, after all, but sometimes it’s hard to know how old your mind is. For example, I still take in a breath and hope I never have to go back when I pass my old highschool back home. My mind has forgotten that I’m 32, and it has been 14 years since I roamed those halls. In the same sense, I felt a little apprehensive coming back to Ames. After all, I really, really screwed my life up here.
Ames is absolutely beautiful, and the people are just as friendly as I recall. My friends are so lovely and sweet (they just turned 80 years old) I want to fold them up, put them in a box and take them home with me. Points of interest are just that — points of interest. I remember all the great things about Iowa — the excellent education system, the friendly, down-to-earth people. The deciduous trees and rolling hills that we don’t see in Arizona are all palliates to my sight.
Today we went to the Reiman Gardens and watched 750 butterflies flutter in a greenhouse, surrounded by tropical vegetation that smelled of Japan and Yoron Island. And I felt no pain, no remorse, just a simple gladness that I came here, and made these friends, and that the path of my life went the way it did. Because if I had done things differently, I might have stayed here, and majored in engineering, and graduated with a decent job, and never gone to Japan, never met Marti, never had the wonderful and amazing children I have…. You get the picture. So how can I regret the stupid mistakes of my life when my life — the life I am living right this second — brings me such immeasurable joy?
When I was 18 I vowed to live life with no regrets. I immediately did many things I dearly regretted. But now, looking back after 14 years, I start to think that maybe I have done just that, because I couldn’t take it back — not any of it.
Ames is beautiful. This trip, I plan to enjoy its beauty without the stupidity of my youth.
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