Perseverance

Destiny and hardship are twins of the soul. Sometimes we only move forward because the path backwards is clogged by rockfall.

I went to Germany on a “Junior Year Abroad” program from Humboldt State College in the hinterlands of Northern California. I was 19, escaping from my home in Eureka, a small logging town that still dodders along,  a good 20 years behind the rest of the state.

As planned, I spent that first year in Berlin learning German. A language with 12 forms of the article “the” – so no mean feat. But the escape from family and provinciality to the bustling, blustery ‘Großstadt Berlin’ was intoxicating. That May, I begged my parents to let me stay, and got their blessing, contingent on me paying my own way.  By August, I had enrolled at the Economics Department of the Free University of Berlin. I had never been a quick student, never a top student. Too shy, too dreamy, too childlike, even for Humboldt County schools. “You come from good European peasant blood”, my grandmother used to tell me. “Our fires burn slow but long.”

Yes, I promised myself.  I can do this. I will do this. Life loomed ahead of me – four parts enticing to just one part scary.

I signed up for the five economics classes recommended by my advisor. By December, I had failed all five of them. Completely bombed. My German, which was good enough for daily conversations, had nowhere near the proficiency needed for a college class in Business Law or Finance Theory.  

An ego-crushing, fate-confirming hammer.  Shall I go home with my tail between my legs? Or stay and fail again? Surrender beckoned.

I made tea and toast and sat in the common room of my dorm, but couldn’t eat. One by one, neighbors joined me. One girlfriend hugged me, and the tears flowed again, so I told everyone what had happened. Most made sympathetic noises, but one older student laughed. Walter.  He was close to graduation, getting his MBA, and rather smug. Several girls glared at him.

“Oh come on,” he said. “I knew this would happen. “A foreigner, and a girl, I knew it all along.”

Drums went off in my brain like electricity. I could not respond; I just ran to my room sobbing.

Despite the tears, I knew I could not go back home. I loved Berlin and my freedom. Gradually,  a tiny seed of courage began to find roots inside me. I felt that emotion I had always been trained to avoid – anger.  And my self-pity melted in its heat.  “ Well, I might be slow,” I thought. “But the tortoise won the race, right? I will show them.” My long-guarded childhood was over. Hidden under the rock pile of all my past challenges, I found the one character strength I’d ignored – perseverance.

I stayed in school, signed up for only three classes the next semester. And I studied. And studied. My German vocabulary grew. Cyclical, discretionary, pivotal, prolific, eminent, marginal-cost-sensitive. I spent the long minutes needed to decode each of the tapeworm-like sentences in my textbooks. 

May came. I sat for my tests. And I survived.  C minuses in all three classes, but I’d passed. I bought a case of beer and shared it with all my neighbors. 

Except Walter. 

Actually, he wasn’t there anymore, which spared me that act of acrimony.

My grades rose over the next years. I developed a passion for my major, worked part-time, protested all through the tumultuous 70’s, married, had 2 children and began teaching.

Because of that one choice, I ended up living 15 years in Berlin, the walled city, that wondrous, multi-cultural living museum of all the contradictions and energy of the 20^th Century.

I thank you, my stars, that I simply could not face defeat.