A Lifetime of Searching for Truth

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.

But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

-Niels Bohr

When I was a young college student, sitting in The Last Exit coffee house, filling notebook pages with free writing, not even realizing that’s what I was doing or what it was called, I began to write about Truth and what that meant.  I wrote that some things are true forever and cannot be changed and then I wondered if that statement could be trusted. At the time I wrote, "True: My mother loves me and I love her."  But forever? Would that always be true? The confusion I felt that day began to shake my belief system. You hear “But you MUST love her, she's your mother.” 

But would there be anything that could change that, I wondered.

It seemed that it was unlikely, but possible. 

I began questioning everything at that point.  The search for Truth was on.

One story I would like to tell you about is the one of a neighbor boy whose family was from the South.  

My family detested Southern accents.  I was never sure why.  They made jokes about the stupidity of 

people who spoke with a drawl.  That language made them less than OK. In fact, almost 

everyone who was not us, was considered less than OK.

 I had no one to look up to, as a child,  because we were at the top of the heap. 

Heap is the proper word here too, because we lived in an old old ramshackle farm house, 

raised sheep in a converted chicken shed and pumped water to the house 

from a creek, or crick as we called it.  Oh yeah, we had a whole lot to be 

snobbish about. 

The four of us kids took the school bus to school.  

My older sister sometimes had rides from friends who had cars but my brother and I took 

the bus to Middle School and my little sister to Kindergarten. Anyway I rode to school with the other kids from our mountain (Bear Prairie) and I always prayed that shy David would 

sit by me.  He lived up the road about a mile.  He had older brothers and 

talked so slowly and with such a beautiful language I just wanted to hear 

him say my name, “Hi, Carol, can I sit here with you?”    He was the first 

boy I went steady with.  Which in those days just meant that I would get to 

sit by him on the bus and no other girl could.  I was sure that Mother would

be impressed...wow... that I had a boy friend. 

I was on my way to being a big girl, maybe even a woman.

But that's not the way it happened. Instead she teased and laughed, “What does that mean?,"

she asked. "Going Steady. Tepee full?”  

Well, nevertheless, I went on enjoying my new status with the girls at 

school.  Even though it meant very little to them either, just that I could 

be included in the group of those who were "going steady."

The first really big purchase I made in my life was buying this same Southern Prince. 

It was at the slave sale for Latin Club.  Some of the students were up on the block and we would bid real money for them.  

I bought my guy for $10!  Well in 1960 that was a whole lot of babysitting 

at 35¢ per hour.  But it was worth it.  While he was my “slave” I could 

have him carry my books etc... For a whole week we were really pretty steadily together.